Holiday accidents

Clay v TUI UK Ltd [2018] EWCA Civ 1177

The summer holiday season is fast approaching, and people taking holidays abroad have lessons to learn from a case recently considered by the Court of Appeal, in which it was held that a judge had not been wrong to dismiss a claim for damages brought against a travel company by a holidaymaker who had fallen from a hotel balcony and fractured his skull. The holidaymaker and his family had been trapped on the balcony of their apartment as a result of a defective lock in the balcony door for which the company was liable, but the holidaymaker had taken the matter into his own hands by trying to climb onto the neighbouring balcony, a decision regarded by the judge as so unreasonable in the circumstances that it broke the chain of causation.