Collective Commentary about the New Package Travel Directive

670 COLLECTIVE COMMENTARY ABOUT THE NEW PACKAGE TRAVEL DIRECTIVE According to the text of the Law, the information must be given twice, once at a precontractual stage and again when the contract is effectively concluded. 18 . Apart from the legal discussion on the differences between “precontractual” and “contractual” stages, from a pragmatic point of view this has been considered too high an administrative burden, both for the travel industry and the consumers. For that reason, the standard practice currently applied in Belgium is to bundle all the information imposed by the legislation in the following set of documents: 1/ The standard information forms attached to the PTD 2/ General terms and conditions which are those published by the Belgian Travel Dispute Committee 7 and which generally contain the dispositions of the Law 3/ Special terms and conditions which contain rules that are specifically applicable to each individual travel company (containing for instance cancelation fees, etc). 4/ The order form, which describes the actual characteristics of the trip According to article 5 of the Law, this information must be communicated to the traveller before he is bound by a contract. Each travel company decides how to communicate these documents, but the burden of proof of the traveller receiving the information lies with the travel company. Standard practice is that this information is communicated once, despite the terms of the law. 6. CONCLUSION 19. Despite the fact that the new PTD is a maximum harmonisation directive, our view is that, because of the different practices inMember States, the difficulty to regulate complexity of the travel industry, particularly in a single text, the complexity and various interpretation of the PTD and especially of the legal definitions, the deviations to the PTD in the national legislation, there is still a way to go before achieving a genuine single European travel market. As mentioned above, we believe that case law across the EU will contribute to further interpret the PTD, hopefully in a consistent manner. 7 https://clv-gr.be/.