Collective Commentary about the New Package Travel Directive

786 COLLECTIVE COMMENTARY ABOUT THE NEW PACKAGE TRAVEL DIRECTIVE 2. THE COURSE OF THE LEGISLATIVE PROCESS RELATED TO THE IMPLEMENTATION 3 The NPTD was implemented in Finland with the acts from the Ministry of Economic Affairs and the Ministry of Justice. Most of the articles were implemented with the Act on Combinations of Travel Services (901/2017) which was supplemented with a Decree of the Ministry of Justice on information to be provided to travellers relating to combined travel services (181/2018). Chapter V of the NPTD dealing with the insolvency protection was implemented with the Act on Providers of Combinations of Travel Services (921/2017) 4 and the Act on the Supervisory and Insolvency Protection Fee Payable by Providers of Travel Service Combinations (922/2017). This systematic approach originates from the transposition of the previous PTD (90/314/EEC) which saw the national provisions divided between two Ministries and several acts and decrees. During the consultation process of the drafting the idea of setting up a separate fund following the Norwegian and Danish model emerged. The idea of establishing the fund can be seen as influenced by the experiences of bankruptcies under the old package travel act where consumers either lost their full compensation or the payment of compensation took unreasonably long, such as the bankruptcy of Töölö Travel Agency in 2006 and the bankruptcy of Oy Air Finland Ltd in 2012. This motion however faced a constitutional problem as the fund would have been outside the parliamentary budget control and would have therefore required constitutional legislative order to be approved in the parliament. According to Finnish legislation that would have meant that the transposition couldn’t have been completed before the next legislature had took office, so the idea was altogether abandoned at this time. In the spring of 2018, FCCA and the Association of Finnish Travel Agents (SMAL / AFTA) negotiated the terms and conditions to be given to the passenger in connection with the package travel contract. The terms are very much the same as the articles of the NPTD and the national provisions adopted on the 3 General presentation of the Finnish legislative drafting process can be found at: http://lainvalmistelu.finlex. fi/en/ (20.8.2019). 4 NB. Names of the national provisions in this paper are written as they have been translated by the Commission’s translation services. Full list of national transposition measures can be found at: https://ec.europa.eu/ info/law/law-topic/consumers/travel-and-timeshare-law/national-transposition-measures-package-travel-directive_ en (19.8.2019).