Joneseys blog

Alongside buying a house or a car, holidays are probably the next most expensive thing families spend on each year – and the thing that most people look forward to.

If you go on holiday in the UK (and why not, it’s a great place to be on holiday) then anything that goes wrong on the holiday is much easier to sort out as any legal action you take will be based on UK law.

But if you go abroad, and an awful lot of us do, then having an accident can be a real pain if you want to make a claim for injuries you might have suffered.

The Package Travel, Package Holidays and Package Tours Regulations 1992 help.

It’s a real mouthful but it states that if you have booked your travel and holiday accommodation with the same tour operator or provider regardless of where the accident happens you can bring the legal claim in this Country – it’s governed by UK law. Both items have to be booked together – a package deal.

That makes dealing with any claim much easier – anything goes wrong and you are using the UK Courts to sort things out.

That’s fine for package deals, but what about the rest of us – in the internet age it’s becoming increasingly popular to book your flight, ferry or other crossing and sort out the accommodation separately.

If you’ve chosen to do that, any claim for compensation that you might have is governed by the ‘Rome Convention’.

This states that any claim has to be dealt with in the Country it happened in.

It doesn’t mean you haven’t got a claim, just that if you need to bring Court proceedings then they need to be in the Country you were in at the time of the incident/accident. We can still help you with such claims.

So what do you do when booking your holiday?

Like the rest of us, go with what’s good for you and what you want to do.

If the worst happens then you still have a claim and we can deal with it for you whether it’s a claim brought in this Country or anywhere else.