Sustainable Tourism Law

234 SUSTAINABLE TOURISM LAW regulation tool aimed at guaranteeing an effective protection to tourists and at creating certainty regarding the rights and duties of tourism service providers 107 . Then it should be verified whether the Draft Convention, in its latest version, might truly be able to establish a new international legal order. The peculiar type of norms chosen by the Working Group has also to be taken into consideration, being characterized by the coexistence of a series of binding general provisions in tandem with a combination of standard rules and a set of recommended practices. Achieving, ultimately, a global evaluation of the sustainability of the new discipline, in relation to the direct impact on international tourism 108 , also evaluating if it will be effectively accepted by States that potentially might be Member Parties, specifically Countries and regional economic integration organizations that currently play a predominant role on the travel and tourism field. Based on this perspective, the creation of a new uniform system of rules that is able to ensure a high level of protection and assistance to international tourists, also intending to increase the travellers’ trust and to make it possible for service providers to operate under equal opportunities and effective competitiveness conditions, is not going to be considered as a restraint to the development of the trading system, but in fact as a true asset towards a more balanced growth of the global market for travel and tourism and, eventually, becoming more sustainable. 107 C. Lima Marques – D. Wei, UN World Tourism Organization and the protection of foreign tourists in case of emergency situation/force majeure , cit., p. 16, highlight as “we can speak of three waves of efforts. The first efforts have pointed the importance of regulating the transport contracts and the travel agency contracts. The second wave of efforts have focused on the consumer protection in more complex contracts, like the package travel contract and time-sharing contracts. It seems that we are now in a third wave of efforts more focused on the internationalization of ‘consumer protection models’ and stressing the need to increase the international cooperation channels on tourist protection itself. This does not mean that in the future we should not use the well-established consumer protection systems or cooperation for the enforcement with consumer protection agencies, but the aim now seems to be the creation of more confidence on the foreign tourist’s services industry. Here we see a new role for Private International Law”. 108 See, in general, V. Greenwood – L. Dwyer, Challenges to Consumer Protection Legislation in Tourism Contexts , in Journal of Tourism Consumption and Practice , vol. 6, 2/2014, p. 3.