No-show clause in restaurant service contracts Tatjana Josipović1 I. Introduction. – II. Legal nature of no-show fee. – III. No-show clause and consumer protection. 3.1. General. 3.2. Reservation contract as distance contract. 3.3. Unfairness of no-show clause. 3.4. No-show clause and unfair commercial practices. – IV. Conclusion. Reservation cancellation policies must ensure optimal operational efficacy of the provision of restaurant services. It is also important that reservation cancellation policies motivate customers to use the option of booking reservations. A particularly sensitive issue is optimal and just determination of the relationship between the provider of restaurant services and its customer who booked a reservation but did not arrive at the restaurant in due time without cancelling it. Very often restaurants require no-show fee from guests who booked their reservations but failed to arrive in due time. The application of the no-show clause in restaurant service contracts implies a whole series of legal issues in the text, the author analyses the functions and characteristics of the payment of no-show fees and its legal basis and interpretation in the context of the EU rules on the protection of consumers in consumer contracts. The aim is to determine the main characteristics of this obligation and the optimal method of its regulation. keywords: restaurant service, catering service, reservation cancellation policies, no-show clause, no-show fee, unfair commercial practices, unfair contract terms, distance contract, consumer protection. I. INTRODUCTION In the provision of restaurant services, a very important challenge is efficient implementation of its reservation cancellation policies.2 On the one DOI 10.60559/gl04 1 Faculty of Law, University of Zagreb. 2 See Kim, L.E, Tang, J., Kim M., Kim E.J.: The Effects of Restaurant Cancellation Policies and No-Show Awareness Campaigns on Reservation Behaviours, International Journal of Consumer Studies, 2025, pp. 1, 2; https://doi.
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