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

24 through this type of platform has been solved by the doctrine, among which we find ourselves, making an extensive interpretation of the relative term, in such a way that it can be understood as any person that we know today through the multiple platforms, social networks and apps, through which we connect with third parties. V. Other Complementary Tourist Services Finally, we would like to make a few notes regarding many other complementary services that come to replace, to a greater or lesser extent, others of a commercial nature that we need and enjoy on our trips. We must reflect on the advantage, or lack of it, of having these multiple services, since those who have been defending the so-called collaborative tourism, namely collaborative accommodation, insisted that the economic savings that families made on this accommodation were used for other complementary services, especially leisure and catering. So, defending a holiday made up solely and exclusively of services offered under the umbrella of the collaborative economy would make the traditional sector, which is the most affected by the cessation of travel and the cessation of all unnecessary business activity due to the isolation measures by COVID 19 in Spain, even more challenging to overcome. However, it should be noted here that these activities today are not sufficiently important to prevent those other businesses from also benefiting the traveller who is trying to save some of his or her transport and accommodation costs, which are the highest when organising a trip or holiday. Among these new modalities we find, on the one hand, the car-sharing platforms, some of them used by companies in the car rental sector without a driver 50 . These platforms provide a similar service to car rental companies without drivers, although they differ from them in two main ways: (i) because many provide or lease vehicles on a fraction of of the article. What is meant by friendship for the purposes of legal regulation or “equivalent” is part of the lack of timeliness of existing legislation, but such ambiguity prevents contacts made through a platform such as BLABLACAR from being included in the exceptions to the application of the LOTT. The equivalence goes much further, and the intention of the law will have to be defined with other parameters... This equivalence of friendship fits perfectly into two people agreeing to make a trip together, without the exceptional precept limiting the legal situation that we are dealing with being prosecuted ” . 50 This is the case with Avancar, which was acquired first by Zipcar and then by AVIS.