INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TOURISM, TRAVEL AND HOSPITALITY LAW various sectoral directives. Thus, Art. 14 of Timeshare Directive 2008/122/EU stipulates that Member States should take the necessary measures in order to establish and develop an out-of-court complaints and redress procedures for the settlement of consumer disputes. Also, in order to effectively protect tourism service users, both Package Travel Directive 2015/2302/EU and Timeshare Directive 2008/122/EU oblige traders and their branch organizations to inform consumers of the availability of such procedures, i.e., availability of ADR mechanisms pursuant to Directive 2013/11/EU and ODR platforms pursuant to Regulation (EU) No 524/2013.15 Apart from the benefits of ICT tools and Legal Tech in relation to ODR (facilitating individuals’ access to justice, enabling rapid and efficient settlement of consumer disputes, at a lower cost and in a less conflictual manner than conventional litigation, affording more flexibility in the choice of procedures used and solutions offered), the committee and legal doctrine notes that ODR procedures may come with certain challenges, including technical issues, inequalities in individuals’ access to online resources, privacy issues, problems regarding enforcement of decisions, as well as concerns about potentially harmful biases in AI, trust, accuracy, explainability, interpretability, reliability, robustness, safety and security.16 Similarly, institutional reports and legal doctrine identify the lack of awareness of ADR and ODR mechanisms and the lack of incentives for their use as the most important hindrances to their growth.17 At the EU level, the ADR Directive attempts to mitigate this by requiring traders to inform consumers about ADR entities which are competent to resolve consumers’ complaints, and the ODR Regulation requires online traders to provide a link to the ODR platform. At the global level, development of Guide under the auspices of HCCH will certainly 15 Within the EU, tourism-related disputes can be resolved by the dispute resolution bodies of general competence (Belgium, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain and Romania) or special competence bodies dealing with package travel, stand- -alone services (Belgium, Denmark, France and Luxembourg), travel contracts (Austria, Germany), air passenger rights (Norway, Bulgaria, Germany, Italy), and time-sharing (Spain, Portugal). See: Alternative Dispute Resolution in the Air Passenger Rights Sector, http://cecluxembourg.lu/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/ADR-APR-2015- -FINAL.pdf 16 Scholars propose a three-stage process for identifying and managing bias within AI which may be helpful in case of ODR: 1) pre-design, where the technology is devised, defined, and elaborated; 2) design and development, where the technology is constructed; and 3) deployment, where technology is used by, or applied to, various individuals or groups. See: Reva Schwartz et al., A Proposal for Identifying and Managing Bias within Artificial Intelligence, NAT’L INST. OF STANDARDS AND TECH. 1(2021). 17 European Commission, Communication on Alternative Dispute Resolution for Consumer Disputes in the Single Market COM(2011) 791, p. 2, 6; Cortes, P., pp. 131.
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