Collective Commentary about the New Package Travel Directive

628 COLLECTIVE COMMENTARY ABOUT THE NEW PACKAGE TRAVEL DIRECTIVE Chapter II: Obligation to provide information and content of the tourist package contract, contains Article 5, entitled “Pre-contractual information”, which reads as follows: “ Member States shall ensure that, before the traveller is bound by any package travel contract or any corresponding offer, the organiser […] or the retailer […] shall provide the traveller with the standard information by means of the relevant form […]” 9 . The form indicated by the article must include some relevant informations in, including, under letter (c), the total price of the package inclusive of taxes and, where applicable, of all additional fees, charges and other costs or, where those costs cannot be reasonably calculated before the conclusion of the contract, an indication of the type of additional costs which the traveller may still have to bear. For example: VAT, registration tax, stamp duty, waste tax, airport taxes, tourist tax, etc. Article 5(c) essentially concerns public charges, which are not covered by relations of private law. We talk, in fact, of taxes, duties and fees. As it is well known, “tax” means the tax paid by taxpayers to the State, or to a public body, in order to benefit from particular divisible services. Taxes are paid on the basis of the enjoyment of a public good or service 10 . The tax can be defined as a service imposed, in which the contribution to public expenditure is based on an event for the occurrence of which the enjoyment of a public good or a specific correlation between the activity of the public body and the advantage which the taxpayer may derive from it is relevant 11 . Article 5 also speaks of “taxes” and does so in descriptive terms, certainly not in order to capture differences between taxes and duties, but to include all levies generally attributable to the category of tax. However, it should be made clear that taxes are a-causes and are due on the basis of income, wealth or consumption; they are not linked to a public activity. Therefore, the term “tax” refers to levies imposed by the State (or other local authorities) in order to finance indivisible services of common use. 9 This provision of the Directive has been transformed into Article 34 of Legislative Decree No. 62 of 21 May 2018, entitled “Pre-contractual information”. 10 On the concepts of tax, duty and fee see the contribution of B. Peeters, M. Barassi, W. B. Barker, M. Bourgeois, L. del Federico, G. R. Suchy, H. Vording, in Peeters (edited by), The concept of tax in EU Member States – General Introduction and comparative analysis. Specifically see the contribution of L. del Federico, The notion of tax and the different types of taxes , 32 e ss., IBFD, Amsterdam, 2005. 11 For the various basic definitions, please refer to OECD Glossary of tax terms .