Collective Commentary about the New Package Travel Directive

64 COLLECTIVE COMMENTARY ABOUT THE NEW PACKAGE TRAVEL DIRECTIVE arrangements” ; and Article 2.1, the scope of application “ This Directive applies to packages offered for sale or sold by traders to travellers and to linked travel arrangements facilitated by traders for travellers ”. In the second paragraph, its application excludes: (a) packages and linked travel arrangements covering a period of less than 24 hours unless overnight accommodation is included; (b) packages offered, and linked travel arrangements facilitated, occasionally and on a not-for-profit basis and only to a limited group of travellers, (c) packages and linked travel arrangements purchased on the basis of a general agreement for the arrangement of business travel between a trader and another natural or legal person who is acting for purposes relating to his trade, business, craft or profession . This Directive shall not affect general provisions related to national contract law, such as the rules on the validity, formalisation or contracts’ effects, as long as these general aspects of contract Law are not regulated in this Directive. Article 3 provides a much more clear list of definitions, better specifying the definition of package, which includes and collects new ones such as ‘travel services’, including transport, accommodation and, as a novelty, car rental apart from any other tourist service not intrinsically part of a travel service. The figure of the ‘traveller’ is defined as “ any person who is seeking to conclude a contract, or is entitled to travel on the basis of a contract concluded, within the scope of this Directive ”, and that of ‘entrepreneur’ as “ any natural person or any legal person, irrespective of whether privately or publicly owned, who is acting, including through any other person acting in his name or on his behalf, for purposes relating to his trade, business, craft or profession in relation to contracts covered by this Directive, whether acting in the capacity of organiser, retailer, trader facilitating a linked travel arrangement or as a travel service provider” . The definition of ‘organizer’ is “ a trader who combines and sells or offers for sale packages, either directly or through another trader or together with another trader, or the trader who transmits the traveller’s data to another trader ” in accordance with point (b) (v) of point 2 of the definition of package; and the definition of ‘retailer’ is a trader other than the organiser who sells or offers for sale packages combined by an organiser, replacing the previous ‘retailer’ definition; ‘establishment’ means establishment as defined in point 5 of Article 4 of Directive 2006/123/EC ; ‘durable medium’ as “any instrument which enables the traveller or the trader to store information