Collective Commentary about the New Package Travel Directive

José Ángel Torres Lana 1 1. Preliminary ideas; 2. Instrumental and advanced notion of package travel; 3. Defining requirements of package travel; 4. The notion of linked travel arrangements; 5. Situations excluded from the scope of application of Directive 2015/2302; 6. The situation regarding national law. 1. There is no provision in Directive 1990/314 that is equivalent to the rule now under examination. Art. 2 of the aforementioned Directive was dedicated to the same matter as art. 3 of the present Directive, i.e. the definitions, albeit with a narrower scope than the latter. A first reading of art. 2 reveals two possible lines of criticism: firstly, its systematic positioning, and secondly, its content, which makes the title of the article akin to misleading advertising. With regard to the systematic positioning of the norm, one only has to read it to realize that it applies to something that has yet to be defined, given that the definitions are to be found in the following article, number 3. And it is akin to misleading advertising because rather than establishing its scope of application, what is established is its scope of non- -applicability. We shall look into this shortly. A closer reading of the norm reveals the following: the scope of application of the norm, i.e. point 1, is excessively brief and general in nature; its scope of non- -applicability, i.e. the matters excluded from regulation, point 2, is expressed in a clearer, more detailed way; finally, point 3 contains a rule that is completely useless, as we shall see henceforth. As I have just indicated, point 1 of the article is limited to stating that the Directive applies to package travel and linked travel arrangements. However, we still do not know what those elements are. The reason we do not know is that the article dedicated to the definitions is precisely the one following the article that is currently under examination, i.e. article 3. While we may be familiar with the concept of package travel, which was already used by Directive 1990/314 and widely applied in practice, the concept of linked travel arrangements is new. As such, it would be appropriate to undertake an analysis of each one of these two categories of travel, which are similar but not the same. 1 Emeritus Professor of Civil Law. University of the Balearic Islands.