Sustainable Tourism Law

112 SUSTAINABLE TOURISM LAW CONCLUSIONS Traditional travel law has a clear focus on consumer protection and hardly covers any aspects of sustainability. The tendency is to release the consumer from any responsibility instead of making him responsible for his activities and aware of their impact on environment, culture and economy of the country of destination. The new EU PackageTravel Directive completely follows this traditional concept. The Draft UNWTO Convention on the Protection of Tourists and the Rights and Obligations of Tourism Service Providers makes some reference in its recitals to aspects of sustainable tourism. However, the provisions of the Convention and its annexes do not fulfil these promises but turn out to indicate clear consumer protection laws without assigning any significant rights to service providers or local residents at tourism destinations. Finally, the UNWTO Code of Ethics in Tourism, which is now being turned into a Convention on Tourism Ethics, is an instrument clearly dedicated to sustainability. Its weakness, however, is the vague and programmatic wording of its provisions and the lack of any means of efficient enforcement. At least, it includes some initial approaches towards the self-responsibility of travellers, which provides some counterbalance to the one sided consumer protection elements in other legislation. It seems that it needs to make consumer protection associations more aware of the fact that consumers can profit from a more sustainable development in tourism. However, they have to contribute their fair share to achieve this purpose by accepting a certain degree of responsibility. Only if this responsibility is accepted, can consumer protection and sustainability can constitute a “perfect match” – otherwise they will remain a contradiction and a permanent challenge for national and international legislation.