62
Legal Focus
JULY 2014
Travel and Leisure
This month, we focus on the Travel and Leisure industry, and the legal implications that accompany the topic. We speak to Claire Mulligan, Senior Partner at Plexus Law. Claire qualified in 1995 and since 2000 has headed up the Travel and Casualty Department at Plexus Law becoming Senior Partner of the London office earlier this year. She heads up a travel team of over 30 lawyers which is ranked No. 1 by Chambers.
Since 2000 Claire has been listed in Chambers and Partners and The Legal 500 as a “leading lawyer” in the fields of both travel litigation and personal injury (defendant litigation).
What are the common types of cases you see within the Tour Operator industry?
We continue to see a large number of trips and slips around hotels and holiday destinations, a large number of pool incidents, balcony falls continue to be an ongoing issue together with diving accidents usually involving alcohol and young men.
The large sickness outbreak claims that started to generate in the mid 1990’s and continued into the 2010’s involving 1000’s of claimants have certainly started to ease but you do get a very much mixed bag with claims ranging from people complaining about their sea views and quality issues through to multi person fatalities and large incidents.
What are the main challenges you face and how do you address these?
As a result of the large number in claims the team now has a number of specialisms.
We divide these into specific areas within travel with expertise concentrating on terms and conditions and commercial sides, accidents and excursion claims through to adventure, cruise and aviation matters.
Travel is one of the few areas left in the casualty arena where one can successfully pursue a defence. Of the claims that we currently handle, approximately 65% are successfully defended to trial or claimants discontinue before trial itself.
We try to seek to establish where the main types of claims are coming from and then work to obtain good evidence on one of the cases which we think can be defended to trial, run the case to trial as a test case and use that Judgment, be it a Court of Appeal Judgment, or persuasive first instant Judgment to then dissuade future claimant’s solicitors from pursuing a claim.
We use the lessons learned from litigation to feed back to the health and safety teams within Tour
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Operators so that they can work to improve safety on holidays and reduce their claims cost.
Finding evidence to support a defence when you are dealing with suppliers across the globe, speaking different languages and suppliers perhaps not understanding that the English Court case will not go away continues to be a challenge.
As part of the 24/7 crisis management response provided to tour operators, insurers and corporates. Claire has been involved in a wide range of high- profile cases including child abduction in Portugal, air craft accidents, rape incidents on school trips and a polar bear mauling in Norway.
It is vital to ensure that we have experts available either in house or on standby that can assist on a one stop shop basis. Our team includes a Doctor, Assistant Coroner, District Judge and a number of dual qualified members of staff with various language skills to assist in such matters. Our sister firm Argent Health & Safety also has a team of consultants who work on behalf of the hotel and Tour Operators auditing hotels and suppliers with over 45,000 audits that we can reference.
Have there been any recent legislative changes particularly relevant to the Travel and Leisure sector?
The new Package Travel Directive which is currently going through the EU legislative process will see changes as to how we deal with claims and understand how packages are pulled together and the liability flowing from such. No doubt there will be further litigation coming once the regulations are concluded as the various practitioners work out the parameters of the new directive.
Plexus Law Are there any that you would like to see?
Current legislation is comprehensive but the industry is very fluid and changes all the time. The most recent changes which are going through are to reflect the fact that nowadays much of travel is booked online or over the telephone and not when visiting a travel agent with a brochure and there is also a view that customers need to be protected.
As long as it is made very clear to a consumer as to the consequences of buying a package holiday
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and the consequences of buying what we would call an itemised product, such as flights and hotels separately, then they should make the decision as to whether they wish to buy a package which provides them with further protection or to buy an unregulated package which does not.
It is difficult to speculate at the moment on what legislation may need to be brought in without seeing the new Package Travel Directive in its final form.
Is there anything else you would like to add?
The range of holidays now available is hugely diverse and we have seen a large explosion of adventure and remote exploratory type holidays. The more remote destinations do appear to drive increased claims as the UK market expects to find standards similar to what they find in the UK which of course is very rarely the case.
It is perhaps as a result of such more challenging environments into which Tour Operators are expanding that the need for crisis response/ management such as the one we provide has shown such significant growth. LM
Contact: Claire Mulligan
Head of Casualty Injury & Travel Departments
Senior Partner London Tel: 020 7220 5903
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