Sustainable Tourism Law

816 SUSTAINABLE TOURISM LAW has been adopted, and it refers to (a) a hotel in which the rooms or part of them are not owned by a single entity but by several owners, and they are leased back by their owners to the managing company of the project. The owners themselves can only use their unit for up to two months per year, and the managing company uses them for tourism purposes during most part of the year. And (b), this term also includes “time sharing” hotels, where the hotel is operated by a managing company, but numerous vacationers can purchase the right to use a unit for a limited time during the year. In any area that is designated as a “Tourism and Vacation area” by the National Plan, it would be allowed to only construct hotel accommodations and ancillary tourism services. In what is described as a “Special Tourism Zone”, it is permitted to construct hotels, vacation villages and special hotel accommodations, places of visit and ancillary tourism services. As to construction requirements in hotels: How to ensure that the quality of the physical aspects of hotels will be at par with the needs of the tourists and wouldn’t negatively affect the populated area in the vicinity? How and by whom could obligatory standards for their construction be prescribed? Although the Ministry of tourism has the expertise in this respect, only the Minister of the Interior, who is in charge of the Planning and Building law has the general authority in anything pertaining to that law. In the past the Minister of Tourism could act in this matter when hotels needed to be graded in order to be able to operate. The grading system was abolished and now only when a hotel voluntarily requests to be graded by the Ministry, grading can be refused if its construction does not comply with the Ministry’s minimal standards. So, at present the National Plan solved this issue by directing that the binding standards for the construction of hotels will be according to the standards prescribed by the Ministry of Tourism and approved by the National Planning Commission. Consequently, those standards were contested in a court case on the grounds that there was no legislative source which authorized the Ministry of Tourism in this respect. But the court ruled that the local and district Planning Commissions should consider, in their decisions, the standards set by the Ministry. That was a significant achievement for the Ministry of Tourism in that its expertise can