One day I’ll fly away…: Voucher schemes for cancelled package travel contracts after the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic

When the Covid-19 crisis erupted, panic must have hit in the board rooms of tour organisers. With the collapse of giants Thomson Travel Group in 2017 and Thomas Cook in 2019 still in their minds, tour organisers knew that none of them were ‘too big to fail’. As states would not necessarily come to their rescue, tour organisers realised that if at that moment they would have to reimburse consumers for the cancelled holidays, they might instantly go into bankruptcy. In order to prevent this scenario, throughout the world tour organisers issued vouchers representing the value of the cancelled holiday to consumers instead of reimbursing them in cash. Tour organisers in the EU did the same. In this paper, I address the legal aspects of these vouchers and discuss whether vouchers can only serve as stopgaps or whether they can form a serious alternative for reimbursement in the future.