CONSUMER PROTECTION:THE EUROPEAN Commission's plan to protect consumers who book holidays online has been given a guarded welcome by the Irish Travel Agents Association (ITAA).
On a visit to Ireland this week the EU commissioner for consumer affairs, Meglena Kuneva, said she would launch “a major overhaul of the EU’s consumer- protection rights for holidaymakers”, starting this autumn.
The ITAA’s chief executive, Simon Nugent, said his organisation had been lobbying the commission for years about the need to change the EU directive that protects holidaymakers. Describing the reform as long overdue, he expressed concern that it could be several years before any of the proposed changes would be implemented.
He pointed out that although licensed tour operators had to be fully bonded, at a substantial cost, the only real requirement hotels and airlines needed in order to take bookings directly from consumers was a website.
“In general, we are glad that the commission has grasped the scale of this problem, but I think it will take at least two and a half years before we see anything close to a resolution, and there will be a lot of complex issues to be resolved first,” he said.
Speaking in Galway on Thursday, Kuneva said EU law did not reflect changes in recent years that had seen millions of people bypass tour operators and use the web to organise their holidays.
“For Irish consumers it must seem incomprehensible when two people sitting next to each other on the same plane, even going to the same hotel, find they have totally different levels of consumer protection when something goes wrong, simply because the bookings were made in different ways,” she said.
