A flight between Barcelona and Alicante operated by a Spanish airline was cancelled. The onward leg from Alicante to Stockholm operated by another airline went ahead as planned. Under regular circumstances, such a journey would have jurisdiction in Sweden.
However, the appeal court noted that the booking confirmation included separate booking reference numbers for each airline. The passengers had also been informed that they were responsible for their own baggage during the stopover in Alicante. In addition, the airline’s internal records showed that only the Barcelona–Alicante leg was registered with that airline.
On that basis, the court found that there were insufficient grounds to treat the full route from Barcelona to Stockholm as directly connecting flights covered by a single ticket. The fact that a travel intermediary had compiled the flights into one document with its own booking number did not change that conclusion. As a result, the court held that the Swedish district court lacked jurisdiction to hear the claim against the operating airline for the cancelled first leg, and the case was dismissed.
iuno’s opinion
We see this decision as a reminder that jurisdiction and booking structure remain central in aviation disputes. Even if an itinerary appears to be commercially connected through a travel platform, that does not mean that the journey will be treated legally as a single flight connection. The court based the decision on the separate booking references, the responsibility for allocating baggage, and the fact that the airline had registered only its own flight segment.
Airlines should be particularly alert to how ticketing companies and travel intermediaries combine flights from different carriers into a single customer-facing itinerary. Carriers should therefore ensure that their ticketing data, booking records and passenger communications clearly distinguish standalone segments from genuinely through-ticketed connections, and that they retain documentation showing the limits of their responsibility for each leg.
If you would like to discuss the implications of this decision, feel free to contact our Aviation team.
[Svea Court of Appeal decision of 15 April 2026 in case no. Ö 18605-25]