68 TOURISM LAW IN EUROPE of travel packages through the Directive (EU) 2015/2302 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 25 November 2015 on package travel and linked travel arrangements. However, as we will see, the Belgian legislator has introduced some peculiarities in its transposition which will be discussed in this contribution. We will also analyse the impact of this new Directive on the travel sector in Belgium and the changes it implies for the travel industry and travellers themselves. It is difficult to write this article without mentioning the COVID-19 crisis, which has hit the travel industry in an unprecedented way. Particularly from a legal point of view, this health crisis has raised completely new questions that have forced the legal world to be innovative and the government to take controversial decisions. The key legal events related to this crisis will be analysed in this article. 2. SOME NUMBERS CONCERNING TOURISM IN BELGIUM In Belgium, tourism is the exclusive competence of each of the three Belgian regions, namely Flanders, Wallonia and Brussels. According to the numbers gathered by the OECD in 2020: “Tourism generates 2.3% of gross value added in Belgium and accounts for 6.7% of total employment according to the tourism satellite account. Travel accounted for 7.2% of total service exports in 2018. In Flanders, the tourism sector accounts for 4.5% of GDP (EUR 11.7 billion) and 5.5% of employment. In 2017, in Wallonia, tourism created 4.1% of gross value added (EUR 3.6 billion) and was responsible for 84,000 jobs, or 59,000 full-time equivalents, which corresponds to 7.5% of employment in the region. In 2018, Belgium received 6.7 million international tourists (an increase of 6.1% compared to 2017), who spent a total of 12.4 million overnight stays (+6.8%). Of this figure, 3.2 million (47.2%) visited Flanders, 2.7 million (40.6%) the city of Brussels and 815,000 (12.2%) Wallonia. Between 2017 and 2018, Brussels recorded the highest growth in international arrivals (+8.5%), ahead of Flanders (+5.1%) and Wallonia (+2.7%). Belgium’s top source markets are the Netherlands, France, the United Kingdom and Germany, which together account for more than half (52.7%) of total arrivals”3. 3 OECD, OECD Tourism Trends and Policies, 2020, available at https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org.
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