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

As we saw, the CCV Convention did not receive the expected global approval. Likewise, the legal doctrine tries to exam the internal reasons for such lack of success; Jürgen Basedow argues that the CCV Convention leaves “ open loopholes to the operator to contract out of his personal liability by splitting up the inclusive price or by putting an agency clause into the contract ” 32 . Indeed, the CCV, by trying to regulate two complex services related to the consumer at once (intermediary travel contract and package travel contract) and without a sensible regard for his rights and for unconscionable clauses vis- à-vis consumers 33 , as well as undermining the internationality of the consumer relations 34 , has not achieved its uniformisation goal. Nevertheless, perhaps this UNIDROIT effort’s failure can be explained by external factors too. II. The Fall of Global Substantive Uniform Solutions and New International Efforts on Tourist Protection In the author’s opinion, three main external changes have lead to the unsuccess of the 1970 CCV Convention as a truly global uniform law on travel contracts: the first is the rise of domestic and regional consumer law – the traveller is now a consumer and a particularly important and demanding one; the second are the changes in the travel industry itself, with new technologies and intermediaries that allow consumers to book directly in foreign countries, without the presence of a travel organiser or travel agency in the country of origin of the tourist; and the third is the decline of international hard law and global solutions – a new diversification of international sources (soft law, of the key rights under Directive (EU) 2015/2302 is that: “Travellers are given an emergency telephone number or details of a contact point where they can get in touch with the organiser or the travel agent” (Annex 1, Part B). 32 See Basedow, Jürgen. The Law of Open Society , The Hague Academy of Private International Law, Leiden: Brill, 2015, p. 108: 33 These “intermediary clauses” were very common and, in Brazil, were only banished by the 1990 Consumer Protection Code. However, Law 12.974, of 2014 (just before the World Soccer Cup), tried to reinstall the validity of these clauses, but without success thanks to a presidential veto, see MARQUES, Claudia Lima, SOARES, Ardyllis, & LIMA, Clarissa Costa de. Lei 12.974, de 15.04.2014, dispõe sobre as atividades das agências de turismo, in Revista de Direito do Consumidor, vol. 95/2014, pp. 349-358, September-October 2014, pp. 349 & ff. 34 BASEDOW, Jürgen. The Law of Open Society , The Hague Academy of Private International Law, Leiden: Brill, 2015, p. 112; the author calls this process “domestication of international fact situations”.