The Allotment Contract through the Hotel-keeper's General and Special Liability for Damage

AuthorOliver Radolovic
PositionUniversity of Pula, Department of Economics and Tourism
Pages96-107
JICLT
Journal of International Commercial Law and Technology
Vol. 6, Issue 2 (2011)
96
The Allotment Contract through the Hotel-keeper's General and Special
Liability for Damage
Mr.sc. Oliver Radolović
University of Pula, Department of Economics and Tourism,
Croatia, 52100 Pula, Preradovićeva 1,
oradol@efpu.hr
Abstract. The hotel-keeper is liable for any damage due to b reach of the allotment contract.
His liab ility is divided into two types: 1.) general liability - that derives from the agency hotel-
keeper's contract and 2.) special liability - characteristic o nly for the allotment contract. His most
important general liability is the liability for non-payment of the commission and his most
common special liability is the liability for non-providing the allotment a ccommodation. The
purpose of the paper is to analyze the hotel-keeper's contractual liabil ity for non-payment of the
commission and non-providi ng the allotment accommodation to the agency and its guests through
a comparative analysis of the laws of Croatia, France, Ger many, Italy, UK and USA at the EU and
international level. The results of the p aper are answers to given theoretical questions (damage to a
double subjectivity, the types of damage and liabilities, and the comparative solutions) and the
synthesis of the hotel-keeper's liability in the allotment contract analysis. This paper posits the
need for an international convention that would regulate the allotment contract content, especially
regarding the liabilities of the parties.
1. Introduction
According to the allotment contract, the hotel-keeper undertakes the duty to provide availability of certain
number of beds or capacity in the agreed object to the travel agency, provide services to the travel agency's
guests, and pay a certain commission to the travel a gency. In exchange, the travel agency undertakes the
obligation to make the bookings or notif y the hotel-keeper about the impossibilit y to comply with the contractual
terms and pay the cost of services, if the travel agency used the contracted accommodation.
Allotment contract is rar ely regulated by (national or international) law. For this reason, it is also very rarely
analyzed by the lawyers. Its c ontent or part of the content is regulated usually by business practices. Allotment
contract is actually a type of the agency hotel-keeper's contract with the specificity related to the bookings of
specific capacity (cer tain number of beds or accommodation units) and the abili ty or inability to cancel the
contract.
There are t wo types of allotment contract in the comparative law: 1) allotment contract with the (travel
agency's) right of unilateral withdrawal from the contract (the real allotment contract), and 2) allotment contract
with the guarantee charge (the allotment contract ''full for empty'').
In the Croatian law, the allotment contract is regulated by the Obligations Relations Act (Zakon o obveznim
odnosima, hereinafter: ZOO) - article s 909-920 and to a lesser extent (Gorenc, 2002, 3-4) in the ''special co rpus
of norms'' (Šmid, 199 8, 79-95) of the Customary Practice in catering industry (Posebne uzance u ugostiteljstvu -
hereinafter: PUU) - customs 95-102. The breach of the a llotment contract makes the hote l-keeper liable for
proprietary and non-proprietary damage. In Croatian law, allotment contract has the features of a mixed,
consensual, billing and formal (VTS XII Pž-542/05-3 - 31.10.2 006) contract.

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