Tourism Law in Europe

failed to perform its obligations under the holiday contract with reasonable care and skill (cf in this regard Hone ). This is consistent with caselaw in other sectors; the UK courts are generally extremely slow to impose strict liability or to reverse the burden of proof so that it rests on the Defendant, and so it is that even prior to Brexit the UK had diverged from some other European nations in its interpretation of the Regulations. Furthermore, the standard by which the services are to be judged is not that by which they would be judged if the services were to be provided in England. Prior to the passage of the 1992 Regulations, the High Court considered a tour operator’s duty under s.13 of the Supply of Goods and Services Act 1982 to carry out its obligations under the holiday contract with reasonable care and skill. In Wilson , Phillips J held: “(…) there are bound to be differences in the safety standards applied in respect of the many hazards of modern life between one country and another…the duty of care of a tour operator is likely to extend to checking that local safety regulations are complied with. Provided that they are, I do not consider that the tour operator owes a duty to boycott a hotel because of the absence of some safety feature which would be found in an English hotel unless the absence of such a feature might lead a reasonable holidaymaker to decline to take a holiday at the hotel in question (…)”. In Lougheed v On the Beach Ltd [2014] 11 WLUK 780 the Court of Appeal observed that Claimants who do not obtain local standards evidence ‘do so at their peril’. Until recently it appeared from this line of caselaw, therefore, that in almost all cases of this nature it would be necessary to obtain a determination that the feature or service in question breached local standards applicable at the time of the alleged improper performance. So, for example, where a holidaymaker slipped and fell as a result of poor cleaning practices at a hotel provided as part of a package holiday, it was necessary for him or her to prove that the hotelier was at fault in failing to comply with local standards. This necessitated the production of an expert report dealing with the applicable standard at the time of the accident, whether regulatory or by reference to local custom and practice. So it was that lawyers representing UK Claimants approached lawyers in other jurisdictions asking them to provide reports on the local standard in relation to cleaning practices; should warning signs be used, or should floors be dried immediately after being mopped? This created obvious difficulties. In some jurisdictions there was no relevant