Collective Commentary about the New Package Travel Directive

832 COLLECTIVE COMMENTARY ABOUT THE NEW PACKAGE TRAVEL DIRECTIVE No. 2 lit. b (v) and Art. 3 No. 8. These are bookings in which the traveller’s name, payment details and e-mail address are transmitted between different traders through links, and in which the confirmation of the entire booking is issued within 24 hours. According to the Directive, in Art. 3 II b (v), the first trader is considered as the tour organiser with all the respective obligations. (2) Responsibility . The German draft fails to adequately state the liability of the first trader for its terms of the contract, warranty obligations and its duty to provide insolvency protection. In my opinion, the first trader should be expressly designated as the responsible organiser 26 . (3) Bypass the law . We should also keep in mind that the organiser’s position can be avoided if the customer’s data is not transmitted in full or any subsequent contracts are not concluded within 24 hours after the conclusion of the first contract. This fiction of a package leads to a variety of dogmatic and practice- -relevant questions, whether the closed individual contracts persist or the possibility of recourse between the traders 27 . 3. “Gewillkürte Pauschalreise” A) Confusion in tourism industry Big tour operators offer the customers their own single services, such as flights, holiday rentals, hotel rooms and rental cars as a package. They want the same marketing for their single services as their packages. The customer should benefit and receive insolvency protection, even though she only books one travel service rather than a package as a combination of at least two different types of travel services for the same trip. These organisers declare, by a clause of the terms, the single service hotel-only as a package as “Gewillkürte Pauschalreise” 28 . This voluntary upgrade has led to great confusion in the tourism industry, making it hard to understand if this is a package in the sense of the PDT (§§ 651a-c BGB) or a linked travel arrangement (§ 651w BGB). Furthermore, there is also a dispute on whether the insolvency protection under § 651r BGB covers this construction, what information obligations exist, and whether and which standard information set out in Part C of Annex should be given to the traveller. 26 Führich, NJW 2017, 2945, 2947; Führich, NJW 2016, 1204, 1206; Tonner, MDR 2018, 305, 311. 27 Führich, Basiswissen Reiserecht, § 2 Rn 37; Führich/Staudinger § 6 Rn. 3. 28 Führich, Gewillkürte Pauschalreise und touristische Scheinleistungen eines Servicepakets ohne Rechtsgrundlage, NJW 2018, 2926.