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

44 Nevertheless, Ryanair announced that it would appeal against the judgments; it also has more than a dozen other pending challenges as regards aid measures to airlines. Therefore, a number of interpretative questions are still open. 7. Preliminary Conclusions One year into the pandemic and still under strict curtailing measures in most European States, it is too early to draw conclusions about how State aid rules have helped or obstructed the fight against the economic consequences of the pandemic and the pandemic itself. The European Commission is still analysing the data sent by the Member States about the spending under different COVID-19 measures, and based on its conclusions, and the development of the pandemic, it will possibly change the rules further. So, it is still early days to make a final evaluation of the role of State aid in handling the crisis. We will know more once the temporary rules are no longer effect and Member State spending information becomes available through the publication and reporting requirements regulated in the Temporary Framework. 167 Still, these twelve months allows us to draw some preliminary conclusions, which could be updated once the pandemic is over and economies have bounced back. Some of these are of a more general nature, some of them relate to the sector of tourism. Our first finding is, that in these unprecedented times, the Commission, after a short period of silence and hesitation, reacted also in a remarkable fashion by giving large room for manoeuvre for Member States to grant aid under Article 107(3)(b) TFEU; the Commission also adopted a temporary framework to tackle the challenges of the 2008- 2012 crisis, but that was far less flexible than the current temporary framework. Besides, the budgets notified under the current Temporary Framework have also been of a much larger scale. 168 This is partly due to the fact that the economic consequences of the https://www.lexxion.eu/en/stateaidpost/state-aid-may-be-limited-to-undertakings-with-close-links-with- the-national-economy-part-ii/ ( accessed on 10 March 2020). 167 Points 88-90 of the Temporary Framework. 168 The notification of very high budgets might be traced back to two factors. First, if the budget is high enough there is no need for notifying additional amounts to be used as under State aid procedural rules only 20% above the original notified budget can be disbursed without the need for a second approval form the Commission (See the judgment in case C-510/16 Carrefour Hypermarchés SAS and Others v Ministre des Finances et des Comptes publics). Second, the relaxing the EU budgetary rules in March 2020 also give