INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TOURISM, TRAVEL AND HOSPITALITY LAW Keywords: Package travel contract, tour operators, liability, passenger protection. I. INTRODUCTION One of the most controversial and exciting issues in Spain since 1995 has been the liability of the operators involved in the organisation, marketing and sale of a package holiday for the defective execution of the package. The reason for this is the lack of legal certainty that the lack of regulation of this specific issue has created in the doctrine, in the jurisprudence, among intermediaries as well as among consumers, The European legislator has dealt with this issue in an uneven manner in the two directives that have dealt with the subject, i.e. Council Directive 90/314/ EEC of 13 June 1990 on package travel, package holidays and package tours (Package Travel Directive) and Directive (EU) 2015/2302 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 25 November 2015 on package travel and linked travel services (Package Travel Directive and Package Tour Operator Directive); but, in my opinion, in the end it is not dealt with in a solvent way by allowing Member States to opt for a different liability regime. This also means, as we shall see, that in its internal transposition in our country, the issue has been dealt with in a variable or changing manner over time, which could distort the protection of the traveller. It is true that the European Union has been working for decades to improve the protection of passengers because of the imbalance between the professional and the consumer with regard to the terms of the contract, which is usually a mass contract to which the user subscribes with little or no negotiation. This imbalance has been the basis, for years, for a whole series of rules designed to provide better protection for the consumer, and to adapt the organisation of package travel itself, as one of the most important mass contracts that the user enters into when choosing a leisure or holiday trip. The subject of this paper is exclusively related to the evolution of the Spanish legal regime regarding the liability of package tour operators towards the consumer (nowadays the traveller), in order to determine how operators react and whether the steps taken by the Spanish legislator benefit the consumer or not.
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