Collective Commentary about the New Package Travel Directive

THE PROVISIONS OF EXPLICIT TAX RELEVANCE 629 Finally, Art. 5 speaks of “fees”, still from a descriptive point of view, with the intention of including also those public levies other than taxes and substantially attributable to private law fees, but present in some European legal systems (e.g. Spain, France and Italy) with hybrid and public-law features, such as public prices, tariffs, etc. The fees are therefore hybrid pecuniary benefits, halfway between the taxes and the actual private-law payments 12 . In any case, it is clear that the reference made by Article 5 is only to those taxes (indirect) affecting the contractual relationship and related activities: there will be, therefore, the VAT, the stamp duty, the tourist tax, the registration tax, etc. We refer, therefore, to indirect taxes, which affect the “indirect” manifestations of wealth and affect contracts, the provision of services, the sale of goods, etc. Direct taxes, which are those that directly affect the manifestations of wealth on the part of the taxpayer, such as, for example, personal income tax, corporate income tax, property taxes, etc., are not, therefore, included in the norm at all. Before analyzing the provisions of the Directive of explicit tax relevance, however, it should be pointed out that there are many significant provisions of the Directive that have an indirect tax relevance, leading to significant spill-over effects in the tax systems of the States and within the European VAT system. It has to be considered, for example, that under Article 306 of Council Directive 2006/112/EC of 28 November 2006 on the common system of VAT, in the case of tourist services providing multiple services, Article 306 makes the applicability of the special VAT system subject to the fact that all services must necessarily be purchased from third parties. This scheme does not extend to services provided by the Agency itself, even where they are ancillary to the tourist package 13 . Directive 2015/2302, however, defines the tourist package in a single and comprehensive manner (see Articles 1, 2 and 3). It is clear that sooner or later the European legislature will intervene for transposing this unitary concept of the tourist package into the specific VAT directives. 12 For this concept, please refer back, note 8, to 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. 13 See Court of Justice, C-557/11, EU:C:2012:672.