The Legal Impacts of COVID-19 in the Travel, Tourism and Hospitality Industry

2 legal architecture, including the notion of State aid, the notification obligation, the legal options used to repair the damages caused by the pandemic and remedy the economic crisis it caused. It will describe how the provisional State aid rules adopted by the European Commission in March 2019 allow the Member States to grant temporarily public support for undertakings even for their operating costs, just to ensure their survival. It also analyses the different aid granting options of the European Commission’s Temporary Framework and presents how the Member States use them to help undertakings active in the tourism and related sectors. Moreover, the article summarises the first judgments of the European Union’s General Court as regards the Commission’s decisions allowing to grant State aid for airlines hit by the pandemic. Lastly, the article draws some preliminary conclusions about the handling of the COVID-19 crisis, via State aid rules, and the flexibility of such rules. 1. Introduction The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and the following curtailing measures have possibly impacted the travel, tourism and related sectors the most. The world as we knew it until 2019 has fundamentally changed. Undertakings providing services in these sectors lost their clients from one day to the other without having any possibility to get prepared or to reorganise their core functions. Travel bans, the closures of restaurants, hotels and borders resulted in unfamiliar images of emptiness when someone looked around at the most touristic sites of Europe. As the complete disappearance of customers could be easily traced back to public measures necessary to prevent the further spread of the virus, Member States realised the need to compensate these affected businesses and give them temporary financial aid to get over this dark period, which no one knows how long would last. However, European State aid rules set tight controls as regards the spending possibilities of the Member States towards economic actors. As a rule, State aid law does not allow Member States to finance the simple operating costs of the undertakings (e.g. salaries,