A leading industry lawyer has warned a new Package Travel Directive (PTD) will remove the distinction between tour operators and agents.
Peter Stewart of Field Fisher Waterhouse says agents will no longer avoid liability for sales of many products and he blames ‘dynamic packaging’.
Writing in the December issue of the Travel Law Quarterly, Stewart argues: “The industry has been to a large extent the author of its own misfortune.” He accuses companies of “a supine approach” to the Atol Regulations and is damning of ‘dynamic packaging’, arguing the term “has done more to confuse, bewilder and impose obligations than any legislation could have done”.
Stewart writes: “Dynamic packaging was intended to be unbundling. However, the industry … wanted to have its cake and eat it. The industry wanted to pretend that packages were being sold while seeking legally not to sell packages.”
This “poisoned the CAA’s approach to online sales”, he says, adding: “The poison seeped into other government departments and hence [into] HM Revenue and Custom’s approach to agency.”
A revised PTD will see “all contemporaneous sales of travel products … legally regarded as packages with consequential liabilities … [and] will render obsolete the distinction between tour operators and travel agents … in respect of sales of more than one travel product at or around the same time.
“Agents … will only be able to distinguish themselves in terms of obligations and liabilities for single travel product sales. The era of agents being able to avoid liability will be … in the past.”
A revised PTD is expected this spring and likely to be incorporated into UK law by 2017.