The Legal Impacts of COVID-19 in the Travel, Tourism and Hospitality Industry

10 automatically terminated by law. The standard identifies all creditors of the service and wants to ensure that the intermediary is also included among them, with a completely reasonable solution. Italian law consistently qualifies travel intermediaries entered with the customer as an agency contract, and the user must give the intermediary the assets necessary for execution, pursuant to Art. 1719 of Civil Code. If the object of the assignment is the purchase of a tourist package, the intermediary's position is more complex, because his relationship with the traveller remains idle, but there is also another relationship with the organiser. According to a consolidated law approach, "from the moment the agent receives payment from the customer, they also act as agent of the organiser, from whom they are paid the commissions" (see Court of Cassation 8 October, 2009 No. 21388). Therefore, on the one hand, if the agent must pay back to the organiser the amounts the consumer has paid, by virtue of the relationship that binds them to the latter, at the same time, as the agent's agent, he is entitled to commissions for a successful performance. For tourist packages sold before the restrictions were enacted - but influenced by the unforeseeable circumstances -, the intermediary can benefit from the commissions paid, especially if, among the options indicated in Art. 28, paragraph 5, of Decree-Law No. 9 of 2020, the organiser decides to issue the so- called " voucher ", as is very likely. In this case, the assignment received from the organiser can be considered as executed, with the obligation for the latter to pay the remuneration, thus mitigating the financial difficulties of the intermediary whose business was damaged by the forced shutdown due to the events. Intermediaries, like restaurants or hotel managers, were not included in the support measures enacted by the national legislator. Some legislative measures should indeed be devised to protect this category, for which the risk of having to shut down business is high. On the one hand, the subjects operating in the shops had to undergo a temporary shutdown. On the other hand, with all the families forced to stay at home, the dispersion of customers to the detriment of intermediaries is inevitable and should cause a sharp drop even once the