74 TOURISM LAW IN EUROPE within twenty-four hours of the confirmation of the booking of the first service, then this is a linked travel arrangement. The difference with the point (b)(5) of Article 2(2) may seem tenuous. As mentioned above, if this same process is accompanied by a data transfer, it will be a package tour and no longer a linked travel arrangement. This data transfer is therefore the key element which may cause a service to fall under the more stringent package travel regime for the professional. Many professionals will therefore refrain from making this data transfer to avoid falling under the heavier organiser regime than the retailer regime. 3.2.3. RETAILER Although the 1990 Directive already referred to a “retailer”, the Belgian legislator chose to call this service provider a “travel intermediary” in the Belgian transposition of 1994 (“intermédiaire de voyages” or “reisbemiddelaar”). This is no longer the case in the new 2017 transposition, as the Belgian legislator has aligned the Law with the European text and now uses the same terminology. According to Article 2 of the 2017 Law, a retailer is a professional other than the organiser who sells or offers for sale package travel prepared by an organiser. The new version of the law is much more discreet with regard to the notion of retailer than the 1994 Law. Indeed, under the ancient law, it followed naturally from Article 21, according to which: “Any contract concluded by the travel intermediary with an organiser or with persons providing individual services shall be deemed to have been concluded by the traveller”, that the intermediary had to be considered as the traveller’s mandatary. Today, the law is silent on the possible dual mandate held by the retailer. This theory of the dual mandate will be analysed more closely hereunder. It does not provide for any particular liability regime, but does impose certain specific obligations on the retailer, which will be discussed in more detail below. However, it does not specify the legal status of the retailer and which rules should be applied to him: the rules of the mandate? The rules of common law? In our view, it is the rules of the mandate that continue to apply.
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