A travel agency will have to compensate a family for having seaweed on the beach
A court of Bilbao he has sentenced to a travel agency to compensate a family with 5,373 euros what couldn't use the beach from the hotel, on an all-inclusive basis, in the Riviera Maya (Mexico) for being full of algae, reported the Basque consumer association EKA-ACUV, which took the case.
The head of the court of First Instance number 13 of Bilbao considers in the sentence that the travel agency cannot allege a cause of "force majeure", because when the trip was contracted, in May 2018, it was already known of the arrival of sargassum on the beaches of the Riviera Maya at that time of year.
The judge considers that there has been a "lack of information on relevant data" for the contracting of the trip by the organizers, since it affected one of the "main tourist claims" of the hotel and the clients were not communicated so that they could decide with knowledge whether or not they wanted to travel at that time of year.
The plaintiff family requested compensation 11,717 euros, but the judge has only partially estimated the demand, since she considers that they could enjoy the rest of the hotel's services and also had the possibility of traveling to nearby beaches that did clean themselves of algae.
Therefore, it sets the compensation for defective performance in a 30% of the cost of the trip, 2,613 euros, to which he adds other 2,700 euros (900 euros for each of the three members of the family) for "moral damage".
The sentence can be appealed before the Provincial Court of Bizkaia.
