SHERMAN VS READER OFFERS LTD (ROL) particular that the cruise would no longer start in Cambridge Bay – the warnings given did not give a true flavour of the extent of the changes. ROL denied that this was the case. Their case was that a good cruise, seeing the majority of the advertised highlights, remained possible until 5 days after the cruise had actually started. At that point only did it become clear that, with the ice improvement happening too slowly, only a fraction of the NWP would ever be accessible. 2. TRIAL IN THE COUNTY COURT The Shermans issued proceedings, which led to a trial of 8 days at Winchester County Court (during Covid – one hearing day had to be abandoned after a short time when the court clerk went down with Covid – that gives you a flavour of the trial!). After then considering the matter for several months, the County Court Judge (CCJ) issued his 75 page judgment in April 2022. On the first issue, about when the contract was made, and on what terms, the Judge found that the contract (booking) was made when the documentation arrived the day after Mrs Sherman’s booking call. He found that Schedule 1 to the PTRs (Article 3(2) of the Package Travel Directive (90/314/EEC) (PTD)) required that an itinerary must be provided to the consumer before the contract was made. But there was no definition of what was meant by ‘the itinerary’. He found that the short form confirmation received the day after the telephone booking contained a description of the cruise (“The North West Passage - In the Wake of the Great Explorers”), the start and end dates, the name of the ship, and the type of cabin booked. He called this the ‘basic itinerary’. This, he held, was sufficient, in context, to be the ‘itinerary’ for the purposes of the PTRs/PTD. The contract was therefore complete on the day after the telephone call, and therefore the detailed itinerary, arriving 2 weeks after that, was not a part of the contract. Turning to the cruise events themselves, he held that (in line with an expert report from an expert in Arctic navigation jointly instructed by both parties), the basic itinerary was still achievable on the day the cruise set off, and the warnings given in advance were adequate to satisfy Reg 12 PTRs on
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