often with very short notice. The competent authorities in most states further decided to issue travel advices against travel to other countries. The travel advices and restrictions imposed, resulted in mass cancellation of packages that were to take place during the spring and early summer of 2020. Packages were cancelled by the travelers, due to fear of catching the virus, or by organisers that were not able to perform the package due to restrictions. For many of the cancelled packages, question arose whether the traveler was entitled to a refund or not. The organisers often claimed that the traveler was not entitled to a refund, since the Covid19-pandemic was out of the organiser’s control. Since the packages often were cancelled close to departure, the organisers were not entitled refunds from the diferent service providers, i.e. airlines, hotels etc. It became clear that there are no legislations that imposes obligations for service providers to refund the price paid when a service is cancelled due to UEC. In many cases the organisers therefore charged the traveler with a cancellation fee when the package was cancelled by the traveler. In Sweden, as in most other countries, the National Board for Consumer Complaints (ARN) received many complaints where the traveler claimed reimbursement of the total price paid for a package that had been cancelled due to the pandemic. In June 2020, ARN tried a few selected pilot cases. In these cases, the board consisted of three judges together with two represents from the industry and two representatives from the consumer agency. In the decisions ARN laid down the principles on how the cases should be tried. 2.2.1 Burden of proof ARN stated that the burden of proof, in cases where the package had been cancelled by the traveler, rests with the traveler. The traveler thus shall prove that there were UEC at the destination and that the circumstances signifcantly afected the destination or the transport to the destination. The industry initially claimed that, for a traveler to have the right to cancel a trip without cancellation fee, there had to be a negative travel advice from the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Afairs. Even if there was a negative travel advice, the traveler also had to show that the travel advice would be afecting the destination at the time on which the trip was scheduled to take place. In this regard ARN noted that neither the PTA, nor the PTD included a reference to travel advices from the government. Therefore, ARN stated that even if there is not a negative travel advice, the traveler may refer to other sources to prove that the situation at the destination is of such character that it must be considered to exist an UEC. As a result hereof, ARN has accepted articles from Swedish and foreign newspapers as proof of the situation at
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