Position paper
Tourism
The European travel and tourism industry welcomes the European Parliament’s ongoing efforts to revise the Package Travel Directive (PTD) and thanks the Members of IMCO Committee’s for their support to find the right balance between robust consumer protection and a thriving, competitive travel and tourism sector.
However, the sector expresses concern over certain proposals that could inadvertently hinder the package travel model. For instance, restricting prepayments or broadening the “package” definition to include loosely connected bookings within arbitrary timeframes, e.g., 3 or 24 hours, may create legal uncertainty, limit consumer choice, and impose disproportionate burdens on small and medium-sized enterprises, which constitute most of travel and tourism businesses.
To establish a framework that is both principled and practical, the industry recommends two key improvements:
1 – Pre-payments are essential for the financial management of the travel and tourism value chain. Restricting them would disrupt established business models, affect liquidity, limit investment, and ultimately reduce choice and value for consumers, in particular budget sensitive travellers.
2 – Simplify the scope of “packages”, ensuring the definition applies only to deliberately combined services, not to independent bookings made within fixed timeframes.
