Collective Commentary about the New Package Travel Directive

LITHUANIA | DANGUOLĖ BUBLIENĖ AND IEVA NAVICKAITĖ-SAKALAUSKIENĖ 985 Generally speaking, the Travel Directive was integrated into Lithuanian law by using different approaches: some of the provisions (or part of them) were literally copied from the text of a directive into national regulation; some of the provisions were transposed with minor or major terminology changes or other adjustments; several provisions were elaborated trying to fit them into the corpus of the legal system (that mostly relates to the contractual provisions). However, the aim of the amendments of the mentioned legal acts was not only limited to the purpose to transpose the Travel Directive into Lithuanian law. The legislator used a good occasion to revise the legal regulation of legal tourism relations and to eliminate the duplications and inconsistencies, odd legal norms, to reduce the bureaucracy burden; also, new amendments were prepared to introduce the legal background for the restructuring of the state institutions responsible for the management of tourism 17 . Notwithstanding, as it will be revealed in other parts of this article, some duplications were still left. It is important to note that, in the preceding regulation (the first edition of Article 6.747 of the Civil Code), the term ‘tourism services contract’ was used for the description of a contract covering the elements of the package travel contract. However, in the new edition of Article 6.747 of the Civil Code, in the words of the travaux preparatoires , in order to achieve the consistency and clearness of the regulation, the tourism services contract was “renamed” into “package travel contract”. Therefore, the object of the contract – package travel services – remained the same (despite its broader content), whereas, the definition of the contract changed. Although the term of tourism services agreement has much more fitted into the robe of the body of the Civil Code, the change of the definition was inevitable, since the Civil Code was designed to regulate only package travel agreements. After the implementation of the provisions of the Travel Directive, services relating to the organisation of travel (hereinafter, travel services) covered by the Law on Tourism can be of three possible types: 1) package travel; 2) linked tourist service arrangements; or 3) other tourist services (tourist information services, accommodation services, etc.). Hence, after the transposition of the Travel Directive, linked tourist service arrangements are regulated by the specific law (Law on Tourism) but not by the Civil Code. As can be seen from the publicly available information, the transposition process of the provisions of the Travel Directive in Lithuania did not cause hard 17 The travaux preparatoire of the draft of the Law amending the Lithuanian Law on Tourism and amending Article 6.228/3 and section three of the chapter of book six Civil Code and the Annex to the Code.