EC promises tourists protection

The European Commission is to introduce a range of new measures aimed at protecting consumers who use the internet to book holidays, it was announced this morning.

Consumer Affairs Commissioner Meglena Kuneva made the announcement of an overhaul of legislation governing holiday packages at the start of a two-day visit to Ireland.

She said current the holiday protection currently offered by EU law did not reflect changes in the market place over the last decade. She pointed out that when the Package Travel Directive was implemented in the 1990s, two-week packages booked from brochures through a travel agent were the norm.

She said the sector had “transformed in recent years” with millions of people now putting together their own holidays using the internet.

This has resulted in many consumers “falling outside the basic package travel law and sometimes left badly exposed. The status quo is not good enough. Europe’s consumers are not getting the protection they deserve”.

The existing directive sets out consumers’ rights on information, cancellations, substandard service and insolvency for package holidays but Ms Kuneva said that over recent years, her office had continued to receive “a large number of complaints” about the holiday sector.

Common problems included hotels not being as described, companies “going bust leaving consumers in the lurch, problems with substandard service, or car hire.”

She described the questions being asked by consumers about the levels of protection across the EU as “very fair”.

“For Irish consumers it must seem incomprehensible, when two people sitting next to each other on the same plane, even going to the same hotel, find they have totally different levels of consumer protection when something goes wrong – simply, because the bookings were made in different ways,” Ms Kuneva said.

“We need to ask ourselves the following question: should the level of holiday protection offered to consumers become a lottery dependant on the how the different elements of the same or holiday were put together?”

She said the answer was “very clear, that is not the kind of fair European market we are building together”.

She expressed concern that as technology evolved, the number of consumers covered by tough EU holiday protection laws is actually decreasing.

Ms Kuneva said a major overhaul of the EU’s consumer protection rights for holiday makers would be published later this year. “My message is very clear, markets only serve consumers properly when the right level of protection is built in," she said. "And when it comes to giving holidaymakers the peace of mind they deserve, I am convinced we need to look again.”