To enhance the touristic attractiveness of border areas can be very challenging. This happens, especially, when the national transposition of EU regulations on tourism-related services seem to be very complicated.
Michael Sohn from the border association Quattropole e.V. shared with us some comments on the advice case that the association has submitted under b-solutions.
"One of our key objectives within the city network QuattroPole is to enhance the touristic attractiveness of the area by offering cross-border tourism packages. These packages allow our visitors to book a variety of services on either side of the borders. With transposition of European Union Directive 2015/2302 concerning the package travel and linked arrangements into national law, we felt an uncertainty with regard to the legal framework so b-solutions offered us the needed legal expertise . Thanks to it we could clarify the legal framework and we thus learned that a potential legal barrier was not the urgent matter in our case. The different national laws were compatible and so our problem was indeed a lack of knowledge of the law-systems of the neighbouring countries. I sent the b-solutions final report to all our stakeholders in order to initiate a sound discussion on how we can solve the existing problem. Tourism was a key cooperation field within the QuattroPole network before Corona crisis and, without any doubt, it will also be one in the aftermath. The results of the b-solutions project will allow us to define our strategy for the coming years. We are a small organisation that facilitates cooperation between the cities of Luxembourg, Metz, Saarbrücken and Trier. We serve as cross-border platform in the border region between three EU states: Luxembourg, France and Germany. Consequently we work between different law-systems without having a law department at our disposal, like big companies do. So the huge added value of b-solutions for us was to have specialised jurists working on a specific problem affecting our everyday life. This gave us considerable support".