Sustainable Tourism Law

THE UNWTO DRAFT CONVENTION ON THE PROTECTION OF TOURISTS 209 authentic (for ex. Art. 19, “Authentic texts”), testifies the intention to share as much as possible the general principles enunciated by the Convention and the intent to foster their dissemination, looking forward to creating a new international legal setting for tourism contracts and travellers’ protection 24 . However, the perspective of implementing a new global setting to rule interactions between tourists and market operators still shows some crucial issues and can, so far, be considered as a really difficult goal to fulfil, especially in relation to interactions involving the private sector and what concerns the direct involvement of States. As a matter of fact, the stronger the binding rules proposed to protect consumer rights and to govern contract obligations between travellers and market operators are, the harder it seems to obtain a wide and generalized acceptance of regulation options to be internationally approved by Countries mostly interested in tourism and affected by tourist flows. Especially if we analyse the specific scenario, characterized by a strong evolution of contract models and by continuous paradigm changes caused by the technological development of tools for tourism promotion and marketing. In other words, there seems to be a widespread agreement within the international community on fundamental options and general principles, together with a renewed attention to one of the main components of the general economic system and having a full understanding on its importance, both from a cultural and social point of view. Instead, considering some technical decisions taken during the draft of the document, it seems more difficult to reach a strong agreement, especially by those Countries which have recently adopted an updated set of rules to govern travelling contracts and tourist protection 25 . Such awareness of the complexity of this theme and the difficulties to reach a wide agreement on the draft International Convention has also emerged during the selection of technical tools to be adopted and the choice of the legal form on which the content of the treaty should have been based. 24 The rule is in line with Art. 38 of the UNWTO Statutes, “Interpretation and languages”, as it emerges following the amendment adopted by the General Assembly in its 17th session of Cartagena de Indias, November 2007, Resolution 521 (XVII), according to which “the official languages of the Organization shall be Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish”. 25 See the Directive (EU) 2015/2302 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 25 November 2015 on “Package travel and linked travel arrangements, amending Regulation (EC) No 2006/2004 and Directive 2011/83/ EU of the European Parliament and of the Council and repealing Council Directive 90/314/EEC”, which will enter into force on 1 July 2018 and which is binding on the Member Countries of the European Union in a complex transposition process; in this regard, above all, consider the studies published in V. Franceschelli, F. Morandi, C. Torres (ed.), The New Package Travel Directive , ESHTE-INATEL, Lisboa, 2017, passim .