THE EUROPEAN Commission is to introduce a range of measures aimed at protecting consumers who use the internet to book holidays, the EU consumer affairs commissioner Meglena Kuneva announced yesterday.
At the start of a two-day visit to Ireland, Ms Kuneva said the protection currently offered to consumers under EU law were out of date and did not reflect changes in the travel sector over the last decade.
She warned, however, that some of the enhanced protections envisaged could end up costing businesses more and those costs may subsequently end up being passed on to consumers.
Ms Kuneva said that when the package travel directive, which established rights for consumers who purchase package holidays, came into effect in 1990, most holidays were booked through travel agents. The sector had “transformed in recent years”, she said.
Up to 46 per cent of Irish people now organise their holidays themselves. 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,” Ms Kuneva said.
The directive sets out consumers’ rights on information, cancellations, sub-standard service and insolvency for package holidays but, Ms Kuneva added, her office continued to receive “a large number of complaints” about the holiday sector.
The most frequent complaints included hotels not being as described, companies going out of business leaving consumers in the lurch, problems with sub-standard service and car hire.
“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,” the commissioner said.
“We need to ask ourselves the following question: should the level of holiday protection offered to consumers become a lottery dependent on the how the different elements of the same holiday were put together?”
She said that questions about the rights of holidaymakers who booked directly with airlines came into sharp relief last year after high-profile airline collapses such as XL, Futura and Zoom.
Ms Kuneva added that a major overhaul of the EU’s consumer protection rights for holidaymakers 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 and, when it comes to giving holidaymakers the peace of mind they deserve, I am convinced we need to look again.”
Over the next three months, the commission will set out in detail proposed changes to the existing laws, a move which will involve consultation with the major stakeholders including hotel groups and airlines.
Legislation will then be drafted and it may take up to two years before any changes are made to the directive.
Ms Kuneva admitted that the biggest obstacle in changing the law would be the cost factor, and that those changes might result in higher holiday prices for consumers.
The chief executive of the Consumer Association of Ireland, Dermott Jewell, welcomed yesterday’s announcement and expressed the hope that proposals aimed at protecting consumers booking independent holidays could be fast-tracked.
“The reality is that getting any measures through all the necessary stages will be a bit tricky. I can only imagine the industry-lobbying that will take place,” he said. “The other big question is whether the commissioner will still be there come the autumn and if she is not, who is going to take over.”