CJEU CASE C-299/22 M.D. V UAB TEZ TOUR As is well known, recital of point 31 of the Travel Directive states that "Travellers should also be able to terminate the package travel contract at any time before the start of the package in return for payment of an appropriate and justifiable termination fee, taking into account expected cost savings and income from alternative deployment of the travel services. They should also have the right to terminate the package travel contract without paying any termination fee where unavoidable and extraordinary circumstances will significantly affect the performance of the package. This may cover for example warfare, other serious security problems such as terrorism, significant risks to human health such as the outbreak of a serious disease at the travel destination, or natural disasters such as floods, earthquakes or weather conditions which make it impossible to travel safely to the destination as agreed in the package travel contract." The adoption of the new Travel Directive has thus introduced a fundamentally new definition, which was not previously available in the rules governing organised travel, namely unavoidable and extraordinary circumstances. This definition was inspired by international conventions already existing before the adoption of the Travel Directive and by European Union legislation on passengers' rights ( Council Decision 2001/539/EC of 5 April 2001 on the conclusion by the European Community of the Convention for the Unification of Certain Rules for International Carriage by Air (the Montreal Convention); Council Decision 2013/103/EU of 16 June 2011 on the signing and conclusion of the Agreement between the European Union and the Intergovernmental Organisation for International Carriage by Rail on the Accession of the European Union to the Convention concerning International Carriage by Rail (COTIF) of 9 May 1980, as amended by the Vilnius Protocol of 3 June 1999; Council Decision 2012/22/EU of 12 December 2011 concerning the accession of the European Union to the Protocol of 2002 to the Athens Convention relating to the Carriage of Passengers and their Luggage by Sea, 1974, with the exception of Articles 10 and 11 thereof Regulation (EC) No 261/2004 of the European Parliament and of the Council establishing common rules on compensation and assistance to passengers in the event of denied boarding and of cancellation or long delay of flights, etc.), which have used a unified category of extraordinary circumstances ). A similar term is also used in the Travel Directive, so the term "unavoidable and extraordinary circumstances" used in the Lithuanian translation of the Travel Directive is similar in content to the unified term "extraordinary circumstances". Article 4 of the Travel Directive provides that Member States shall not maintain in force or adopt in their national law provisions derogating from those laid down in this Directive, including more or less stringent provisions, which ensure an unequal level of protection for travellers, unless otherwise provided for in this Directive itself. In other words, the same definition of extraordinary circumstances should have been transposed when transposing the
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