Collective Commentary about the New Package Travel Directive

ARTICLE 22 | DAVID GRANT 473 the bargaining power of the organiser but ideally the choice of law and jurisdiction will be the organiser’s own domestic law and domestic courts. A term of the contract should also provide that the supplier have insurance in place to cover any liability they may incur. The level of insurance should be agreed and the contract should require the supplier to provide copies of the insurance policies, translated if necessary. Finally the tour operator should also have their own insurance in place in case all else fails. We turn now to what might be called dynamic packages i.e. packages which are not pre-prepared or available off the shelf but put together at the request of the traveller either over the internet or the telephone or in person at a travel agency. Here the legal relationships between the suppliers and the organiser are more complicated. At one end of the spectrum the organiser may be a large tour operator who already has direct contracts with suppliers in place, much like those discussed above. In which case the traveller will be choosing from a menu of package components that the tour operator already has in its inventory of travel services. At the other end of the spectrum are travel agents who may, at best, only have agency agreements with intermediaries such as the big bedbanks where the terms of the agency agreement may very well be skewed in favour of the supplier – disclaiming all liability and imposing a foreign jurisdiction and foreign law. In these circumstances the travel agent/organiser may very well not have any contract with the hotel providing the accommodation for the traveller for whom the travel agent has put the package together. So when things go wrong there is no obvious avenue to redress open to them. It is here where the provisions of the PTD relating to redress may come into their own. 3. PROTECTION UNDER ART. 22 Article 22 provides: “In cases where an organiser or, in accordance with the second subparagraph of Article 13(1) or Article 20, a retailer pays compensation, grants price reduction or meets the other obligations incumbent on him under this Directive, Member States shall ensure that the organiser or retailer has the right to seek redress from any third parties which contributed to the event triggering compensation, price reduction or other obligations”.