Hannah Louise Rawson v TUI U.K. Ltd

An appellate court should intervene with findings of fact, evaluative conclusions and expert evidence only in exceptional circumstances. Intervention requires an identifiable error, such as a material error of law, a critical finding unsupported by evidence, a demonstrable misunderstanding or failure to consider relevant evidence, or a conclusion that no reasonable judge could reach.

A judgment must identify the critical issues, address the principal evidence and explain the result sufficiently for the parties and an appeal court to understand it. A claimant bears the burden of proving, on the balance of probabilities, the particular source of an infection. It is not enough to establish illness during a package holiday or to show that hotel food and drink was the only food consumed.

The claimant, a school teacher, became ill during an all-inclusive holiday in Mexico booked through the defendant tour operator. She alleged that contaminated hotel food or drink had caused gastroenteritis, initially attributing the illness to cyclospora. A regional laboratory reported cyclospora oocytes, but a national reference laboratory did not.

The Leicester County Court accepted that she became ill during the holiday and that a pathogen caused the illness, but found that it was not cyclospora and that she had not proved that the pathogen came from hotel food or drink. The claimant appealed on grounds concerning the evaluation of expert evidence, the treatment of the laboratory results, causation and the adequacy of reasons. The High Court also dealt with permission to appeal.

1. Permission and disposition. Permission to appeal was granted, but the appeal was dismissed after the court determined the full appeal at the rolled-up hearing.
2. The trial judge was entitled to prefer the evidence of the respondent’s microbiologist. The national reference laboratory was more experienced in detecting cyclospora, its testing was treated as the gold standard, and the judge was entitled to find that the regional positive result was a false positive. The cross-examination answer that a single positive test was treated as a probable case for public-health and treatment purposes was not a concession that cyclospora was proved on the balance of probabilities in this litigation.
3. The appellate court applied the high threshold governing challenges to factual findings and expert evaluations. The judge had evidence supporting his conclusions, understood the competing explanations for the laboratory results and gave adequate reasons. The appeal court was not entitled to re-evaluate the evidence merely because another view was possible.
4. The claimant had to prove that the unidentified pathogen came from food or drink consumed at the hotel. The absence of a general outbreak was a relevant evidential consideration, although illness could be sporadic and the records were not perfect. The judge was entitled to consider alternative routes of ingestion, including contact with contaminated surfaces, the sea or swimming pool, without the respondent pleading one specific alternative source.
5. The court rejected challenges based on the hotel audit, alleged hygiene concerns, Mexican cyclospora outbreaks and allegedly undisclosed food-testing reports. Those matters did not compel a different conclusion or justify an adverse inference.
6. The complaint that the trial judgment lacked reasons failed. A judge need not address every point, provided the critical elements of the decision and the principal contrary evidence are sufficiently explained. Failure to request elaboration at hand-down does not bar an appeal.

• High Court (King's Bench Division): Permission to appeal granted at a rolled-up hearing; the full appeal against the Leicester County Court judgment was dismissed.
• Leicester County Court: HHJ Murdoch dismissed the claimant’s contractual personal injury claim after a three-day trial; judgment handed down orally on 1 March 2024.