Sustainable Tourism Law

556 SUSTAINABLE TOURISM LAW In February 2010, the Industry, Tourism and Commerce Ministry published the Royal Decree 39/2010, of 15 th January, repealing different national regulations on the access to tourism activities and their exercise. This Royal Decree was motivated by the need to comply with the requirements of the freedom to provide services, and left the door opened to the Autonomous Communities to adopt the relevant regulations under the provisions of the 2006 Directive. The Royal Decree 271/1988 and the Ministry Order of 14 th April 1988 were also repealed. As already noted, during 2013 some travel agencies declared their insolvency. This evinced the legislative differences existing in Spain regarding the guarantees that travel agencies had to provide after the Services Directive. Every Autonomous Community had decided how to implement the Directive into its internal regulation. In some territories there wasn´t even any reference to the duty to provide such guarantees, despite the fact that such obligation resulted from national and European regulations. The opening of these insolvency proceedings was followed by an action brought before the European Commission by a Consumers Association about the failure to comply with the European and national regulation on guarantees. This all led to the need for a reform of article 163 of the GLPCU 34 . The current wording of the regulation in force has solved some of the previous doubts about its content. It has also included some innovations and, in general, it uses a better legislative technique. The duty of organizers and retailers to keep a permanent financial guarantee is kept in the new regulation. The determination of its amount is left to the relevant tourism administrative body, whose concrete designation depends on every Autonomous Community. This protection guarantees the fulfilment of the obligations resulting from the provision of the travel agencies’ services to those acquiring a package travel. In particular, in the event of the insolvency of the agency, this guarantee protects the effective reimbursement of the payments that the travellers have made, covering the services that have not been performed. This latter exception -even though it could be considered obvious- has clarified the scope of such a guarantee 35 , as it would not be logical to also cover the reimbursement of the whole amount when the consumer had benefited from some of the services included within the package. 34 This reform was brought about by means of the Final Disposition 17.3rd of the Act 15/2015, of 2nd July, on non-contentious jurisdiction, BOE no. 158 of 3rd July. 35 MARTÍNEZ ESPÍN, P., “La reforma del artículo 163 TRLGDCU por la Ley de Jurisdicción Voluntaria”, Centro de Estudios de Consumo , 2015, available at www.uclm.es/cesco.