The Legal Impacts of COVID-19 in the Travel, Tourism and Hospitality Industry

COLLABORATIVE TOURISM ACTIVITIES 247 of platform has been solved by the doctrine, among which we find ourselves, making an extensive interpretation of the relative term, in such a way that it can be understood as any person that we know today through the multiple platforms, social networks and apps, through which we connect with third parties. V. OTHER COMPLEMENTARY TOURIST SERVICES Finally, we would like to make a few notes regarding many other complementary services that come to replace, to a greater or lesser extent, others of a commercial nature that we need and enjoy on our trips. We must reflect on the advantage, or lack of it, of having these multiple services, since those who have been defending the so-called collaborative tourism, namely collaborative accommodation, insisted that the economic savings that families made on this accommodation were used for other complementary services, especially leisure and catering. So, defending a holiday made up solely and exclusively of services offered under the umbrella of the collaborative economy would make the traditional sector, which is the most affected by the cessation of travel and the cessation of all unnecessary business activity due to the isolation measures by COVID-19 in Spain, even more challenging to overcome. However, it should be noted here that these activities today are not sufficiently important to prevent those other businesses from also benefiting the traveller who is trying to save some of his or her transport and accommodation costs, which are the highest when organising a trip or holiday. Among these new modalities we find, on the one hand, the car-sharing platforms, some of them used by companies in the car rental sector without a driver50. These platforms provide a similar service to car rental companies without drivers, although they differ from them in two main ways: (i) because many provide or lease vehicles on a fraction of the time (minutes and hours) rather than daily; and (ii) because such vehicles are often leased and used within the same municipality51, even though there is nothing to prevent them from being used for intercity travel 50 This is the case with Avancar, which was acquired first by Zipcar and then by AVIS. 51 ARMENGOL i GASULL, O. & OLMOS CASTRO, N., “El impacto de la economía colaborativa en el transporte interurbano: un análisis jurídico del Ride Sharing”, in La regulación de la economía colaborativa, Juan José Montero Pascual (Dir.), Tirant lo blanch, Valencia, 2017, p. 329.

RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTE4NzM5Nw==