Sustainable Tourism Law

208 SUSTAINABLE TOURISM LAW increase the travellers’ trust; this would be achieved through providing an adequate support when needed or when an emergency occurs. On the other hand, it seemed necessary to implement a system of rules, especially for what concerns tourist service providers responsibilities, so as to guarantee that all key-players on the market might operate based on equal opportunities and effective competition, regardless of the Country of origin and place where services are provided. Noticeably, the draft Convention is introduced to serve as a legal tool that is essential to ensure the growth and development of tourism worldwide, in a setting that is increasingly complex and diversified, as well as subjected to new challenges imposed by market development and deeply characterized by the lack of harmonized rules on consumer protection, thus acting as a considerable obstacle both for tourist protection and cross-borders exchanges 23 . According to official documents, with the aim of increasing tourist trust on service providers, on States action and on the tourist sector as a whole, the two main following objectives have essentially been foreseen by the draft International Convention. Firstly, the Agency seeks to establish standardized rules to guarantee and promote an adequate level of protection for tourists, in order to safeguard them as consumers and provide support during unexpected events, through an improvementof cooperationamongStatesunder suchextraordinarycircumstances. Secondly, it seeks to explain the duties and rights of tourist service providers, fostering the correct balance between State duties, responsibility of key-players from the private sector and protection of tourists. Therefore, the UNWTO action is based on the extremely ambitious attempt to create a set of standard rules to govern the system of private interactions and the need of travellers for protection, that characterize the tourism phenomenon in general, including each part and all different features as a whole. Such a purpose is clearly illustrated not only in the Preamble of the Project, but rather in Article 1, par. 2, of the document where, to provide emphasis and considering the fact that it is the beginning of the document, it is declared that “this Convention applies to all tourists, tourism service providers and tourism services”. Likewise, the decision that texts in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and, Spanish – UNWTO official languages – have to be taken as equally 23 Consider the document EC/89/8, “Study on tourist/consumer protection. Drafting of a new international legal instrument in the tourism sector”, of August 2010, presented at the 89th session of the Executive Council, held in Kish Island, Iran, on 26 October 2010.