ebookers.com Deutschland GmbH v Bundesverband der Verbraucherzentralen und Verbraucherverbände — Verbraucherzentrale Bundesverband eV.
Date: 2012-07-19
12. In that regard, it should be borne in mind that, according to the Court’s settled case-law, in interpreting a provision of European Union law, it is necessary to consider not only its wording but also the context in which it occurs and the objectives pursued by the rules of which it is part (see, inter alia, Case 292/82 Merck  [1983] ECR 3781, paragraph 12; Case C-34/05 Schouten  [2007] ECR I-1687, paragraph 25; and Case C-433/08 Yaesu Europe  [2009] ECR I-11487, paragraph 24).
13. As is evident from both the title and the wording of Article 23(1) of Regulation No 1008/2008, that provision seeks to ensure that there is information and transparency with regard to the prices for air services and, consequently, it contributes to safeguarding protection of customers having recourse to those services.
14. In particular, the last sentence of Article 23(1) of Regulation No 1008/2008 refers to ‘optional price supplements’, which are not unavoidable, in contrast to air fares or air rates and other items making up the final price of the flight, referred to in the second sentence of Article 23(1) of that regulation. Those optional price supplements therefore relate to services which, supplementing the air service itself, are neither compulsory nor necessary for the carriage of passengers or cargo, with the result that the customer chooses either to accept or refuse them. It is precisely because a customer is in a position to make that choice that such price supplements must be communicated in a clear, transparent and unambiguous way at the start of any booking process, and that their acceptance by the customer must be on an opt-in basis, as laid down in the last sentence of Article 23(1) of Regulation No 1008/2008.
15. That specific requirement in relation optional price supplements, within the meaning of the last sentence of Article 23(1) of Regulation No 1008/2008, is designed to prevent a customer of air services from being induced, during the process of booking a flight, to purchase services additional to the flight proper which are not unavoidable and necessary for the purposes of that flight, unless he chooses expressly to purchase those additional services and to pay the corresponding price supplement.
17. In that connection, as the Advocate General observed in point 39 of his Opinion, it would be at odds with the purpose of protecting a customer for air services — pursued by the last sentence of Article 23(1) of Regulation No 1008/2008 — if that protection were to depend on whether the optional additional service, connected with the flight itself, and the corresponding price supplement offered during the process of booking that flight originate from an air carrier or from another party which is legally and economically separate from it. If it were permissible to make that protection dependent on the status of the provider of that additional service, by granting protection only where the service was provided by an air carrier, that protection could easily be circumvented and, consequently, the objective in question certainly compromised. In any event, such a procedure would be incompatible with Article 22 of Directive 2011/83.