Collective Commentary about the New Package Travel Directive

306 COLLECTIVE COMMENTARY ABOUT THE NEW PACKAGE TRAVEL DIRECTIVE • Article 13, leaving to one side the stated possibility of making the retailer also responsible, establishes that the traveller shall inform the organiser without undue delay of any lack of conformity which he perceives during the performance of the contract, and it is the organiser who must remedy the lack of conformity. • In relation to reducing the price and compensation for damages, article 14 also refers to the traveller and the organiser. • According to article 16, the obligation to provide assistance in packages also lies with the organiser. • And in terms of protection against insolvency for packages, article 17 places the obligation to provide a guarantee on the organiser. • And in this specifying of responsibilities, it should be stated that article 15 establishes the possibility for the traveller to contact the organiser through the retailer. The function is to act as intermediary, rather than having responsibility. • In contrast, the duties resulting from the pre-contractual information, as established in article 5 of the Directive, lie with both the organiser and the retailer. On the other hand, it has to be said that when the Directive has wanted to make a person other than the organiser responsible, it has done so, as is the case with the duties of information previously stated or responsibility for errors in the booking, which shall lie with the “trader”, according to article 21. Given this situation, it seems that responsibility was quite well specified in the Directive; the question that arises with the introduction of the second paragraph in article 13.1 is whether it is appropriate to extend the responsibility of the organiser set out in the articles stated previously to the retailer in the same terms. Although it should be taken into account the actual role played by the retailer in package travel contracts; it is normally much more limited in scope, normally he has not concluded contracts with the different individual service providers that make up the package, and although Spanish case law on the matter states otherwise, it is rare for this process to go beyond selling the package previously put together by the organiser. With regard to the responsibility of the organiser and the retailer, the Spanish courts have delivered the following judgement: The ruling of the Provincial Court of Madrid of 27 March 2009 describes very well the regulatory and case law stages on the matter, referring specifically to the responsibility that can apply to travel agencies: “... The first question that we must examine in this case refers to the