Unit 8: Legislation and Ethics in Travel and Tourism Sector Report

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UNIT 8 LEGISLATION AND ETHICS IN TRAVEL AND
TOURISM SECTOR
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Table of Contents
LO1 Legal and regulatory framework in travel and tourism.....................................................3
Task 1 (LO1, AC1.1, 1.2, M1, M2, M3, D1, D2, D3)...............................................................3
1.1 Legal and regulatory framework......................................................................................3
1.2 Surface, sea and air transport law in relation to the carriage of passengers.....................3
LO2 Legislation and regulations relating to health, safety and security....................................6
Task 2 (LO2, AC2.1, 2.2, M1, M2, M3, D1, D2, D3)...............................................................6
2.1 Impacts of the principles of health, safety and security legislation..................................6
2.2 Legislation that relates to equality....................................................................................6
LO3 Consumer protection legislation........................................................................................9
TASK 3 (LO3, AC3.1, 3.2, M1, M2, M3, D1, D2, D3)............................................................9
3.1 Contract legislation...........................................................................................................9
3.2 Consumer protection........................................................................................................9
LO4 Business ethics...................................................................................................................1
TASK 4 (LO4, AC4.1, 4.2, M1, M2, M3, D1, D2, D3)............................................................1
4.1 Ethical dilemmas..............................................................................................................1
4.2 Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) policy in travel and tourism business................2
Reference List............................................................................................................................4
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LO1 Legal and regulatory framework in travel and tourism
Task 1 (LO1, AC1.1, 1.2, M1, M2, M3, D1, D2, D3)
1.1 Legal and regulatory framework
1.2 Surface, sea and air transport law in relation to the carriage of passengers
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4
Leaflet for Legal and regulatory framework in travel and tourism
Legal and regulatory framework
Every business sector is regulated by the
application of specific legal and regulatory
frameworks (Shakeela et al. 2015, p.2).
The legal frameworks in force at UK as
per this this scenario includes the
following:
● The package holiday must include the
transportation facility to the travel
destination, accommodation spanning
the entire duration of the holiday and
the other necessary services required
by the tourists (netlawman.co.uk,
2019).
● The duration of the holiday must be
above 24 hours and inclusive of an
overnight accommodation
(netlawman.co.uk, 2019).
● A single day entry to a tourist place of
attraction and the same day exit from
that spot cannot be entitled as a
Holiday Package (netlawman.co.uk,
2019).
● The package must be made available
to the interested tourists for the
purpose of selling at an inclusive
price. This implies that all the
components included in the package
must be sold by the travel agent and
bought by the tourist together
(netlawman.co.uk, 2019).
● Any optional brochure presented to
the customer must necessarily include
the information details of the tourist
destination, characteristics of the
destination and the categories of the
travel transport required
(netlawman.co.uk, 2019).
In the same scenario, the applicable
Acts and Regulations of UK are stated
as follows (Velasco, 2016, p.270):
● Tourism Act, 1969
This Act in accordance with “British
Tourist Authority” regulates the
working of the several tourism
organizations and their coordination
nature in terms of travel and tour
(netlawman.co.uk, 2019).
● Transport Act, 1980 & 1985
This specific Act is in charge of the
control and regulation of the national as
well as private bus services of the
tourism companies plying in different
routes of the tourism oriented
destinations (netlawman.co.uk, 2019).
● Package Travel & Tour
Regulations, 1992
This Act is applicable in case of the
package tours and travels as the
delivering of the package tours by the
travel agents to the tourist customers are
carried out as per the provisions
mentioned in these regulation guidelines
(netlawman.co.uk, 2019).
Some of the regulatory frameworks
ensuring a happy travel experience to
the customers availing them are as
follows (Stubbs, 2017, p.2):
● Strategic Rail Authority (SRA)
All the transport related facilities in
connection with the railway availed
in tours and travels are regulated by
this Authority (netlawman.co.uk,
2019).
● Health and Safety Executive
(HSE)
Every travel destination has its own
environmental characteristic which
might affect the health of the tourist
traveling to that destination. The
tourism company in such condition
must follow the regulatory guidelines
mentioned in this (netlawman.co.uk,
2019).
● Health and Safety Commission
(HSC)
The health and safety Commission
(HSC) is in charge of the health and
safety of the tourists during the time
of their travel as well as for the entire
duration of their tour in the
destination (netlawman.co.uk, 2019).
● Maritime Authorities
In case the tour is arranged in sea or
waterside places and there is a
requirement of the maritime
facilities, then the concerned
Maritime Authorities provide the
essential guidelines
(netlawman.co.uk, 2019).
● International Air Transport
Association (IATA)
The tours in the foreign destination
are of chief attraction for the travel
agents. All such foreign destination
tours and the aviation facility thus
availed is assessed by this association
(netlawman.co.uk, 2019).

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● Air Law
The Air Law comprises of the
contribution of the statements of
“The Warsaw Convention of
1929”. In case of unfortunate
accidents resulting in the
untimely death of passengers
and their claim for
compensation is covered by the
provisions mentioned in this
law. In this regard, there is
another legal agreement known
as “The Five Freedoms
Agreement of 1944” covers the
necessary rules and regulations
in connection with the landing
across the several foreign and
domestic territories of both
traffic and non-traffic regions
(Almeida et al. 2018, p. 234). This
Agreement further includes the
issues of passenger and cargo
landing. More such conventions
and protocols in connection with
the Air include Tokyo (1963),
Hague (1955) and Montreal
(1975). Apart from this the
Denied Boarding Compensation
Schemes decided by the
European Union (1997) is also
in charge for the purpose of
functioning as Air Law
(netlawman.co.uk, 2019).
● Sea Law
The Sea Law is basically defined as
a type of contract law. This law is in
force to ensure the shipping safety
and security for all the large vessels
plying from one place to another in
the seawater (Adreniran and Yusuf,
2016). This law further regulates the
environmental factors in connection
with the sea. Another Sea Law
includes the provisions mentioned in
“The International Convention for
the Safety of life at Sea (SOLAS)”.
As per the provisions of this law, a
tourism sea craft is allowed to travel
with a maximum number of 12
tourists equipped with the necessary
life guarding and fire safety
instruments. The lifetime safety of a
shipping vessel is taken care of by
“The Athens Convention, 1974”. As
per this act any damage liability of
the ship or the ferrying vessel is
covered by insurance
(netlawman.co.uk, 2019).
● Surface Law
The Surface law is largely
governed by the “The
International Carriage of
Passenger by Road Act, 1979”.
This is because the law is
responsible for the protection of
the passenger rights onboard the
vehicle. This includes all the
physical damages as well as
mental disorders caused to the
passengers during their stipulated
time of travel. “Carriage by
Railway Act, 1972” takes the
responsibility of the luggage
insurance of the passengers during
the time of their travel. Apart
from the passenger luggage, the
transportation of the cargo goods
as well as the interests of the
disabled passengers on board is
also included by this Act. The
Surface Law is further governed
by some other Acts such as
Carriage of Passenger by Road
Act 1974, London Conventions
for limits of liability
(netlawman.co.uk, 2019).
Surface, sea and air transport law in relation to the carriage of passengers
The travel tours in UK are arranged by availing either or all the facilities of Air, Sea or Surface transportation
(Gordin, 2016). These three available facilities are governed by the concerned law of UK as stated below:

LO2 Legislation and regulations relating to health, safety and security
Task 2 (LO2, AC2.1, 2.2, M1, M2, M3, D1, D2, D3)
2.1 Impacts of the principles of health, safety and security legislation
2.2 Legislation that relates to equality
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Legislation and regulations relating to health, safety and security
Impacts of the principles of health,
safety and security legislation
1. The idea of a trip of Thomas Cook
Discovery to an interesting place
evokes a sense of happiness among
the tourists availing the trip facility.
In this regard, it is the duty of the
trip manager of the Thomas Cook
Discovery to ensure the health and
safety of their tourist customers
(Kumar and Rao, 2018, p. 2). This
is accomplished by the adoption of
the principles of health, safety and
security legislation. These are
adopted keeping in mind the
possible hazards involved in travel
and tourism sector. One of the most
prevalent hazards observed in travel
and tours is the health hazard in
connection with fatal accidents. The
most important Act in this regard is
“The Health and Safety at Work
(HSWA 1974)”, which ensures
good working condition of the
employees during the time duration
of their duty hours (Flaumenhaft
and Ben-Assuli, 2018). The
underlying options of this Act
prevalent in UK are stated as
follows:
2.
● Guidelines
The guideline guides the people working for
Thomas Cook Discovery about the knowledge
of existence of the legislation in charge for
health and safety guidance. These guidelines
also help the concerned people to comply with
the legislation by providing the necessary
technical provisions.
● Approved Code of Practices (ACOP)
The practices followed by Thomas Cook
Discovery are concerned with the hazardous
work procedures involving the usage of
hazardous raw materials. As these working
principles include the possible life threatening
scenarios, any violation in these guidelines
leads to a punishable offence in the side of the
employer. Some of the practices that need to
be followed are stated below:
1. Resisting any kind of accidents by the
deployment of necessary actions
2. All the actual as well as the potential
hazards must be reported to the
concerned authority as quickly as
possible
3. Mandatory attending of the training
programs meant for the employees to be
working with hazardous materials
required in hazardous industry
procedures
● Regulations
The employer of Thomas Cook Discovery is
solely responsible for the availability of the
necessary fire equipments as well as First Aid
in case of any accident occurrence. The list of
statutory requirements required for
employment in any hazardous scenario
includes First Aid, Lighting, Fire Equipments
and many others. The specific health and
safety codes are to be distributed among the
employees in written format and include the
following in their employment schedule:
3. Newly recruited employees are informed
right at the time of induction
4. Existing as well as new employees must
be given training about the handling of
the equipments
5. Drill mechanisms as well as showing
caution signs should be properly
explained to the employees
6. Mock drills pertaining the fire
extinguishing and the evacuation of the
people must be arranged at regular
intervals
7. Providing handbook related to fire and
safety and assessing the knowledge
gathered from the books
8. The session meant for the advice
imparting must be arranged as frequently
as possible

and Ben-Assuli, 2018
8
Legislation that relates to equality
In the current era of prevalent globalization, the concept of equality must be observed in every aspects of life
including the arrangement of holiday tours and travels in order to avoid discrimination. Thomas Cook Discovery
abides by this concept by avoiding any instances of Direct, Indirect and perceptive discrimination. The domain of
discrimination includes the harassment as well as disability. The various types of discrimination are stated below:
● Any discrimination caused
directly by the violation of
the definition of equality as
per the law. This is observed
to be prevalent in case of
genders. Thomas Cook
Discovery must ensure that
their tours and travels have
an equal participation of both
the genders.
● The kind of discrimination
that has been caused
indirectly states that a certain
group of people have been
subjected to injustice by
denying them a particular
facility or service. Thomas
Cook Discovery may arrange
easy trips for people who
usually do not get to travel
due to personal reasons such
as victim of phobia and many
others. These trips are to be
arranged in such a way that
the participants are
entertained greatly during the
trip and as a result of which
they are interested for more
such trips in future.
●
● The incident of discrimination caused by
perception reflects that discrimination may take
place based on personal perception or by
stereotyping. Thomas Cook Discovery must come
up with innovative tour plans for their reach out
to more number of people. Also, the tour planners
of Thomas Cook Discovery must not indulge in
stereotyping of the tourists based on several
factors such as assuming that people belonging to
hilly areas always prefers seaside for the purpose
of holiday trip.
● The most crucial form of discrimination takes
place as harassment done to the people with
respect to denial by the concerned client,
contractor, supplier and many others. Disability
discrimination is the most inhuman form of
injustice as this restricts an individual from
availing a facility or service citing disability as
the reason. On the contrary, in most of the cases,
it has been observed that disability in the form of
dysfunctional body is present either from birth or
happened as a result of some unfortunate
accidents.
In this regard, it is to be kept in mind by Thomas Cook
Discovery that such disable people must not be
excluded from availing their tour facility. In fact, these
type people of people must be encouraged to avail their
facility. All the necessary equipments must be carried
by Thomas Cook Discovery for this purpose. Also in
case any disabilities are caused in the travel time of
tour conducted by Thomas Cook Discovery, then the
required compensation must be paid by the company as
well as all the claims of the individual must be
respected (Crick et al. 2017, p. 421).
In this context, several of the
following acts are in force to
resist discrimination.
● Sex Discrimination Act,
1975
● Race Discrimination Act,
1976
● Employment Protection
(Consolidation) Act, 1978
● Disability Discrimination
Act, 1995
● Employment Act, 2002
● Human Rights Act, 1998

LO3 Consumer protection legislation
TASK 3 (LO3, AC3.1, 3.2, M1, M2, M3, D1, D2, D3)
3.1 Contract legislation
3.2 Consumer protection
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1
CONSUMER PROTECTION LEGISLATION
Contract legislation
The tourism plans of Thomas Cook Discovery come in the form of tourism
packages that are presented in front of the potential customers as a contract.
The parties involved in this contract signing process are the customers
availing the package facility and the representative from the company
Thomas Cook Discovery. This contract acts as a binding agent for the two
parties for the completion of the tour as per the contract decided. The
document of contract must include the trip details such as date of departure,
date of arrival, place of night stay, destination details, details of the heads for
which the trip amount have been charged and many others (Maniatis, 2016, p.
10). Each and every contract includes some basic details as listed below:
The Consumer Protection Legislation is responsible for the protection of consumer rights (Chopra
et al. 2017, p. 63). The consumer protection is necessary in case of any breach of contract by the
party offering the contract as well as the party accepting the contract (Neacsu, 2016, p. 301). The
consumer protection refrains the businessmen from practicing any unfair means of business
(Neacşu, 2017, p. 40). As mentioned by the provisions of “The Consumer Protection Act of 1987”,
the legal responsibility of the manufacturers lies in the providing of the required information to the
customers as per the customers satisfaction. As per the provisions of “The Trade Description Act of
1968”, the manufacturers are prohibited from providing misleading informations to their customers.
This includes incorrect description of the product, false offer given by the manufacturers, incorrect
service details provided to the customer and many others. This Act further covers the cases
involving supply of poor quality goods as compared to the promised excellent quality of goods to
the customer. Another well known regulation known as “Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading
Regulations 2008 (CPR)” regulates the authentic charges of the products, application of the
surcharge in correct amount and many others. This law is especially applicable in the hospitality
industry as this regulates the fixing of correct room charge for hospitality industry, service
providing during room renting, price disclosure in bars, decision about minibars charges, charges
for entertainment spots such as swimming pool, gym and many others.
Also there exists Acts and Regulations for the
protection of consumer rights. These are stated
below:
 Package Travel, Package Holidays and
Package Tours Regulations 1992
 Torts of negligence and nuisance
 Duty of care
 Vicarious liability
 ‘Uberrimae Fidei’
● Trip Offer details
The details of the intended trip must be clearly stated in the travel contract of Thomas Cook Discovery
for the customers accepting the offer. This includes both the dates of departure from the origin and
arrival to the destination, mode of transportation arranged for the trip to be a successful venture and
many others.
● Acceptance criteria
The acceptance criteria of trip contract of Thomas Cook Discovery is fulfilled only when the customer
agree with the company agent about the trip and proceeds further by paying the full amount charged for
the trip by the company. As a mark of accepting the trip contract, both the customer and the travel agent
need to sign the contract in presence of each other.
● Consideration criteria
The validity of a contract is guaranteed only when a certain amount of consideration has been met.
Otherwise, the contract is treated only as an agreement. For Thomas Cook Discover trip contracts, only
after receiving an amount as fee from the customer for the trip, the contract for the trip is guaranteed.
● Capacity details
The capacity details are the bindings of the parties that restrict them from being a part of the contract.
The Thomas Cook Discovery makes it mandatory that no individual below the age of 18 can enter into a
trip contract until and unless accompanied by parents.
● Certainty
Both the parties agreeing to a contract must necessarily be certain of one another. This implies that all
the trip contract of Thomas Cook Discovery must possess certainty for both the parties. If by any
chance, the trip is cancelled by any one of the parties, it should be informed to the other party.
Several of the contract laws in connection with consumer protection are
stated below:
 Contracts for supply of goods
 Contracts for provision of services
 Contracts related to package holidays
 Valid contracts
 Unfair contracts
 Laws of agency

LO4 Business ethics
TASK 4 (LO4, AC4.1, 4.2, M1, M2, M3, D1, D2, D3)
4.1 Ethical dilemmas
The travel and tourism sector is a verse sector and as a result of this, the chances dilemmas
arising are much more than any other sector (Alsarayreh, 2018, p. 25). This is primarily
because, the tourism industry has to depend on several external factors such as cross-cultural
nature of the customers, political instabilities observed in some otherwise tourism friendly
places and many others. In addition to this, social restrictions are also responsible for the
hindrances caused to the tourism industry (Casado, 2017, p. 404). The different nature of
perspectives of the Governments related to the tourism facilities is also a cause of concern.
Many developing countries are unable to afford costly and lengthy Visa process and thereby
allow the foreign tourists in exchange of minimal documents (Mohd Rasdi and Ismail, 2017,
p. 2). On the contrary, the developing countries make it mandatory for completion of the visa
procedure with all the documents. It has been recently observed that some serious issues such
as corruption in the form of bribery, gender discrimination, increased rate of sexual
harassments, depletion of natural resources, unavailability of healthy food and many others
are some of the main causes of hindrance in the growth of tourism industry. The increased
rate of child labor and human trafficking has put many restrictions on the otherwise free
business of tourism. On the contrary, the adoption of equality in many sectors has witnessed a
significant growth of the industry in recent years.
For the well known travel and tourism company Thomas Cook Discovery, the company has
faced several issues in its business such as VISA problem, gender discrimination problem and
many others. But the company makes it a point to respond to every ethical consumerism and
also indulges frequently in several of the Corporate Social Activities (CSR).
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4.2 Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) policy in travel and tourism business
Corporate social responsibility can be defined as the programs undertaken by the Board with
recommendations and activities according to the CSR committee. CSR has become universal
in the hospitality and tourism business. CSR refers to as the activities of practicing
sustainable development, equal opportunity and environmental protection. The practical
impacts of CSR in travel and tourism business are quite particularly important because of its
response in increasingly selective and ethical consumer base (Alvarado-Herrera, 2017, p.
245). As justified by Dabic (2016, p. 255), it has been seen that over the last sixty years CSR
had focused on travel and tourism business by focusing on efficiency, profitability and the
stakeholders perceptions.
Figure 1: Articles published on CSR for tourism business
(Source: tandfonline.com, 2018)
In last ten years, significant growth has been seen in CSR for travel and tourism business. In
the year 2006, no articles where published on CSR whereas in 2007 two papers were there for
publication (Farrington, 2017, p.35). It can be clearly seen that in the year 2016 the
publication rose to its peak with 88. According to a research in Web of Science database was
referred for books and articles related to CSR in travel and tourism business. Nevertheless,
almost a hike of 70% for all articles has been seen in the last five years (Font, 2019, p.15).
Technology plays a huge role in speeding up the process for which the tourism companies are
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