Coach Tour Compensation Claim

Valerie Wreford-Smith & 21 Ors V Airtours Holidays Ltd (2004)

The trial judge was entitled to find on the evidence of two reliable witnesses that a coach driver contracted by the defendant had not been to blame for failing to take any action in order to avoid an oncoming car that had veered into his carriageway and collided with his coach.

The claimants (C) appealed the dismissal of their claim against the defendant (D) for personal injuries sustained in a road traffic accident. The accident occurred on a dual carriageway in Turkey. C were holiday-makers returning from a package holiday booked though D, and were travelling on a coach contracted by D. The carriageway was divided from the opposite carriageway by a central reservation made up of bushes. The coach was struck by a taxi travelling in the opposite direction which, for an unexplained reason, veered across the central reservation and into the coach.

As a consequence the coach veered off down an embankment and turned over many times before colliding with a pylon. There was no dispute that the driver of the taxi had been predominantly to blame for the accident. However, by these proceedings C alleged that the driver of the coach (X) had to some extent been to blame for failing to have been sufficiently alert to the road in front and the dangers upon it, for driving the coach at a speed in excess of that permitted on the highway, and for failing to take any action in order to avoid the taxi.

Accordingly, the issues that the judge had to determine were the speed that the vehicles had been travelling, the distance with which avoiding action could have been taken by X, and the time that was available to X to react to the oncoming danger. On those issues the judge preferred the evidence of two witnesses called on behalf of D to the extent that whilst X had been exceeding the speed limit, he had had no chance to avoid the accident since it had occurred too quickly.

The evidence of the coach passengers was that there had been between four and five seconds for X to react. The judge rejected that evidence and dismissed the claim on the basis that the time between the taxi entering the carriageway and colliding with the coach had been too short for X to have taken any action.

C argued that the judge had erred since the only way to reconcile the evidence was to conclude that the taxi had been travelling more slowly than found by the judge, that the distance the taxi had been from the coach when it entered the carriageway was further than that found by the judge, that therefore there had been sufficient time for X to slow down and that he had failed to do so because he had been travelling at an excessive speed causing the coach to veer off down the embankment.

HELD: The judge took into account the fact that the burden of proving the case had rested upon C and that their evidence, contained in a number of witness statements, had been compiled five years after the event and, mostly, in very similar standard terms. It was the judge's broad conclusion that C's evidence had been a process of reconstruction and that he had preferred the evidence of the two witnesses for D to the extent that X simply had no time to react to the danger. The judge's findings were findings that had been plainly open to him to reach in light of his acceptance of D's evidence. He was entirely justified to dismiss the claim and find that despite X's speed he had not been negligent.

Appeal dismissed.

Negligence - Personal Injury - Road Traffic (Ltl)

CA (Civ Div) (Potter LJ, Longmore LJ, Maurice Kay LJ) 5/4/2004

LTL 5/4/2004 EXTEMPORE (Unreported elsewhere)

Document No.: AC9900645