Tourism Law in Europe

14 additional consumer protection measure – the way of ultra-preventive control of unfair terms, adopted at the national level, allowing the parties to take the benefit from these terms, which is mainly related to saving time and money for the parties in pre-contractual relations altogether ensuring the fairness of the contract. Although Part 5 of Article 6.161 of the Civil Code allows to establish the rule in the law that the competent institution has a power to approve standard contract terms according to which the contract shall be concluded, it should be noted that approval of standard terms by the competent institution is not that common national practice, as these terms are mostly used when concluding very specific types of contracts, such as heating, water or electricity purchase agreements with household consumers, insurance contracts, etc. In case of package travel agreements tour organiser and travel retailer (travel agency) are responsible for the inclusion of standard terms into the contract. Although such standard terms should serve as a way of protecting consumers from the unfair contract terms, their efficiency is debatable. Firstly, after looking at the content of the approved standard terms it is obvious that these terms do not provide significant added value as they mostly repeat the provisions of the Civil Code on package travel contract, simply structuring them and embedding several additional requirements, e.g. to provide very detailed information on the main features of transportation and accommodation, to use provided personal data only for the performance of the contract, etc. As travel organisers still have a right to include additional terms into the package travel contract, the risk of introducing unfair contract terms persists. For example, the State Consumer Rights Protection Authority assessed fairness of the contract term, providing that organiser is entitled to terminate the package travel contract before the start of the package without paying compensation if the minimum number of participants, i.e., 80 percent is not reached. The Authority stated that both national and European legal acts do not provide that, instead of the minimum number of tourists, the minimum percentage of tourists could alternatively be indicated. Therefore, Authority concluded that the minimum number of tourists, expressed as a percentage, does not comply with the above-mentioned legal regulation, and substantially violates the rights