Flight Tickets Bought Online and Jurisdiction: The CJEU rules on the Montreal Convention

The author of this post is Giulio Monga, a lawyer admitted to the Milan Bar with a PhD in Private International Law from the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Milan.

On 17 September 2026, the Court of Justice of the European Union delivered its judgment in Vueling Airlines (C-876/24), addressing jurisdiction under Article 33(1) of the Montreal Convention of 1999 for the unification of certain rules for international carriage by air.

The judgment concerns a question considered in 2019 by the Italian Supreme Court in an order that I have discussed in a earlier post on this blog: whether passengers purchasing air tickets online may bring proceedings at their domicile under the connecting factor of the “place of business through which the contract has been made”. The two courts reached opposite conclusions.

The facts

The dispute arose from the loss of baggage during a flight from Madrid to Barcelona operated by Vueling Airlines. The passenger had purchased the flight ticket from her home in Fuenlabrada (Spain), using the online platform e-Dreams. She subsequently purchased an additional baggage transport service in person at the Madrid airport. Following the loss of her baggage, the passenger brought an action for damages before the Court of First Instance in Fuenlabrada, where she resided.

The referring court considered the carriage to be domestic. Although the passenger had taken a connecting flight from Barcelona to Rome, it lacked information allowing it to establish that the journey constituted international carriage under the Convention.

The court referred by way of preliminary rulings three questions to the Court of Justice of the EU. First, it asked whether the rules on jurisdiction established by Article 33(1) of the Montreal Convention apply to carriage performed entirely within one Member State. Secondly, it asked whether, in case a ticket is purchased online, the passenger’s principal and permanent residence could qualify “as the place where the carrier had a place of business through which the contract was made”. Thirdly, it sought clarification as to which contract mattered for that purpose where the ticket for the passenger transport service and another for the additional baggage service had been purchased in different places.

The legal framework

The Montreal Convention unifies certain rules governing international carriage by air, including carrier liability and jurisdiction over claims for damages. Pursuant to Article 1(1) and (2), it applies to “international carriage”, as defined by reference to the agreed places of departure and destination and any agreed stopping place.

The Convention was approved on behalf of the European Community by Council Decision 2001/539/EC. Since its entry into force for the Union on 28 June 2004, its provisions have formed an integral part of EU law. The Montreal Convention is complemented in the EU by Regulation (EC) No 2027/97 on air carrier liability in the event of accidents, as amended by Regulation (EC) No 889/2002. In particular, the former governs air carrier liability in respect of passengers and their baggage, and the latter amended it to give effect to the relevant provisions of the Montreal Convention with respect to carriage within a single Member State.

The Montreal Convention deals with jurisdiction over passengers’ claims for damages in Article 33. Specifically, Article 33(1) provides that an action for damages may be brought, at the option of the plaintiff, before the courts of the following contracting States: the State of the carrier’s domicile, the State of the carrier’s principal place of business, the State where the carrier has a place of business through which the contract was made, or the State of the place of destination of the flight.

Article 33(2) provides an additional forum for claims arising from the death or injury of a passenger. At the option of the plaintiff, such claims may also be brought before the courts of the State Party in which the passenger had their “principal and permanent residence” at the time of the accident. Such residence alone, however, is insufficient. For that additional forum to be available, the carrier must operate passenger services to or from the State concerned, either with its own aircraft or with another carrier’s aircraft under a commercial agreement. It must also conduct its passenger transport business in the State concerned from premises owned or leased by itself or by another carrier with which it has a commercial agreement.

The ruling of the CJEU

The CJEU held that Article 33(1) governs the identification of the competent court in the circumstances of the main proceedings, involving carriage between two airports within the same Member State.

The conclusion follows from Articles 1 and 3(1) of Regulation No 2027/97, according to which the relevant provisions of the Montreal Convention apply also to carriage within a single Member State, and EU carriers’ liability for passengers and their baggage is governed by the relevant provisions of that Convention. The Court held that those provisions include the jurisdictional rules governing claims for damages, alongside the substantive rules on liability.

The Court’s reasoning reflects the objective of establishing a uniform liability regime for EU carriers, irrespective of whether the flight is domestic or international. In this regard, the absence of a cross-border element does not prevent the relevant Convention provisions from applying.

The second question concerned the interpretation of the “place of business through which the contract has been made” under Article 33(1). More specifically, the referring court asked whether that connecting factor could encompass the passenger’s principal and permanent residence where the ticket had been purchased online from that location. In support of that interpretation, it referred to the order rendered by the Italian Supreme Court in 2019 and to several other decisions of Spanish courts. In particular, on that occasion the Italian Supreme Court held that passengers purchasing air tickets online could bring proceedings at their domicile, giving an extensive interpretation to the connecting factor of the “place of business through which the contract has been made” set forth in Article 33(1) of the Montreal Convention. However the referring court pointed out that the opposite conclusion had been reached by a Canadian court, which ruled that the computer used by a passenger to purchase tickets could not qualify as the relevant place of business (paragraph 30).

When answering the question, the CJEU first recalled that the expression “place of business through which the contract has been made” must be interpreted uniformly and autonomously, having regard to the Convention’s objective of unifying certain rules governing international carriage by air. Its meaning must therefore be determined by reference to the rules of interpretation of public international law, rather than the meanings that might be attributed to it under national law. In particular, the Court referred to Articles 31 and 32 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties of 1969, which require consideration of the ordinary meaning of the treaty’s terms, their context and the treaty’s object and purpose, while permitting recourse to supplementary means of interpretation, including the preparatory work of the treaty at issue and the circumstances of its conclusion (paragraphs 54-55).

Applying those rules, the Court rejected the interpretation under which the passenger’s residence could constitute the “place of business through which the contract has been made” for the purpose of Article 33(1) of the Montreal Convention.

To reach this conclusion, the Court first examined the wording of Article 33(1) in several authentic language versions. In this regard, the Court found that, in their ordinary meaning, the terms used do not refer to the residence of the claimant. Rather, the connecting factors listed in that provision refer either to a physical presence of the carrier, such as its domicile or a business establishment, or to a place connected with the carriage itself, namely the destination (paragraphs 56-57).

Secondly, the Court considered the relationship between the two paragraphs of Article 33. As explained above, paragraph 2 expressly provides for a forum based on the passenger’s principal and permanent residence, but only for claims arising from death or personal injury and subject to further conditions concerning the carrier’s presence in the State concerned. According to the Court, interpreting paragraph 1 as already providing a residence-based forum whenever the contract was concluded online would deprive the additional forum provided under paragraph 2 of its practical effect in relation to such contracts (paragraphs 58-61).

Thirdly, the Court recalled that the Convention seeks both to protect passengers and to preserve an “equitable balance of interests”. In its view, that balance would be undermined if the purchase of an air ticket online could expose carriers to proceedings in places – such as the place where the ticket has been bought – where the carrier has no physical presence, and which have no connection with the carriage concerned (paragraphs 62-63).

Finally, the Court considered the circumstances surrounding the adoption of Article 33(2). It observed that online booking was already known when the additional forum was introduced. It further recalled that a forum based on the passenger’s domicile or residence had been discussed during the negotiations. The resulting compromise made that forum available only for claims arising from death or personal injury, subject to the additional conditions laid down in Article 33(2) (paragraphs 64-65).

On those grounds, the Court concluded that purchasing a ticket online from the passenger’s principal and permanent residence does not make that residence the carrier’s “place of business through which the contract has been made” for the purposes of Article 33(1) (paragraph 66).

The contrasting approach of the Italian Supreme Court

The comparison with the Italian Supreme Court’s Order No 18257 of 8 July 2019, discussed some years ago on this blog, highlights the differences between the two interpretative approaches.

On that occasion, the Supreme Court started its reasoning from the difficulties of identifying a carrier’s branch or agency through which an online transaction had been concluded. In this regard, it rejected the location of the server as an appropriate connecting factor: passengers could hardly be expected to ascertain it, and reliance on that location would undermine predictability. To overcome those difficulties, it identified the relevant place with the passenger’s domicile, understood as the place where the passenger became aware of the conclusion of the contract.

In doing so, the Italian Supreme Court expressly acknowledged the need for an autonomous interpretation of the Convention. The difficulty was therefore not the absence of that methodological premise, but its application. The solution adopted relied heavily on passenger protection and drew support from the rationale underlying consumer jurisdiction under the Brussels I bis Regulation. Although the Supreme Court did not directly apply the Regulation’s consumer jurisdiction rules, it used them to support its interpretation of Article 33(1) of the Montreal Convention. Yet Article 17(3) of the Brussels I bis Regulation itself excludes transport contracts from that protective regime, apart from contracts combining travel and accommodation for an inclusive price. It is therefore difficult to derive from those rules a general preference for jurisdiction at the passenger’s domicile. By contrast, Vueling Airlines grounds the interpretation in the Convention’s own jurisdictional scheme and the balance of interests reflected in its provisions.

The two courts also read Article 33(2) differently. For the Italian Supreme Court, that provision appeared to support a broader interpretation favouring passengers. For the CJEU, its limited scope instead confirmed that the passenger’s residence could not be treated as a general ground of jurisdiction under Article 33(1).

Foreseeability likewise played different roles. For the Italian Supreme Court, the passenger’s domicile offered a sufficiently certain connecting factor in an otherwise difficult-to-locate transaction. Conversely, in Vueling Airlines, the emphasis shifts to the carrier’s ability to foresee where it may be sued. The disagreement therefore concerns not only the identification of the competent court, but also the weight assigned to passenger protection within the interpretation of the Convention.

Passenger transport and additional baggage services

The third question examined by the CJEU in Vueling Airlines concerned the purchase of the baggage service separately from the passenger’s ticket.

In this regard, the Court held that the relevant contract for the purposes of Article 33(1) of the Montreal Convention remains the contract for the carriage of the passenger. The conclusion was based on two reasons. First, the Convention treats baggage transport as ancillary to passenger transport. Its provisions on baggage documentation, liability and compensation reflect that relationship. Secondly, Article 33(1) refers to “the contract” in the singular. Accordingly, the separate purchase of a baggage service at another location does not replace the passenger transport contract as the relevant reference for identifying the place of business through which the contract was made.

As noted by the Court, this interpretation also allows claims concerning damage to the passenger and baggage during the same journey to be brought before the same court on that jurisdictional basis, even where the services were purchased in different places. That serves the same purposes of protecting passengers and safeguarding an “equitable balance of interests” considered by the Court in answering the second question.

Conclusion: a convincing decision, with a caveat on technological change

The conclusion reached in Vueling Airlines is, in general, convincing. The difficulties of locating an online transaction cannot justify introducing into Article 33(1) a new connecting factor on the basis of a supposed general principle of favor actoris that finds no support in the Convention. Passenger protection must be pursued within the jurisdictional scheme established by the Convention, including the conditions and limits expressly attached to the residence-based forum under Article 33(2).

The Convention instead requires a balance between the interests of passengers and carriers. As the Court correctly observed at paragraph 63, foreseeability and legal certainty also require consideration of the carrier’s position. Selling tickets online should not, in itself, expose a carrier to proceedings wherever a passenger resides, including places where the carrier has no physical presence, and which have no connection with the carriage concerned.

One element of the Court’s reasoning appears, however, less persuasive. At paragraph 64, the Court observes that online booking was already known when the Convention was adopted. That observation should be treated with caution. Awareness of a technology at a particular point in time does not mean that the parties to a treaty anticipated the scale of its adoption or the changes it would bring to the organisation of commercial activity. The online environment in which the Convention was negotiated in 1999 bears little resemblance to the one in which its rules operate today. The negotiating history may support the conclusion that the restricted scope of Article 33(2) reflects a deliberate compromise. However, the mere existence of online booking at the time does not establish that the implications of contemporary digital distribution were adequately contemplated by that compromise. These are distinct propositions, and the latter should not be treated as following from the former.

This distinction matters beyond air transport, particularly where preparatory work and the circumstances surrounding the adoption of a legal instrument inform its interpretation, as envisaged for treaties by Article 32 of the Vienna Convention. If generalised, the argument that the Internet or another evolving technology was already known when a legal instrument was adopted could too readily become a reason to dismiss interpretative difficulties arising from subsequent technological developments. Respect for the choices embodied in a treaty does not mean treating the technological and commercial circumstances surrounding its conclusion as unchanged. In an era of rapid technological change, such reasoning risks treating awareness of a technology’s existence as foresight of its future development, closing off interpretative questions that those developments may legitimately raise.