Foreign Travel Updates: Know Your New Holiday Destination For 2021
- Travel Lifestyle Places
Donna Hussain- 0
- 7 minutes read
International travel for reasons that are non-essential has been made legal since May 17, 2021. But the green list is too short for travelers to choose destinations for their holidays. In this article, we will talk about the recent foreign travel updates that are happening around the globe.
While the governments have affirmed that there will be travel restrictions by country. The travel industry has not asserted that the list will remain this short as Portugal has shifted to the amber list.
What Is The Reason For International Travel Restrictions?
There have been many changes that the world was bound to adopt and one such was coronavirus travel restrictions. While the government is interested in shifting new cases in the UK, the biggest concern there is the tourists can bring in a variant that can be vaccine resistant. This would render the vaccination drive to be useless and will be harmful to public health. So there have been many international travel restrictions UK.
The main issue lies in working out when a new variant of the coronavirus is significant enough to change the traffic light status of the country.
Dr. Bharat Pankhania who is a senior clinical lecturer at the University of Exeter’s Medical School said in an interview,
“The move from a variant of interest, to a variant of concern, has never been properly identified as the parameters to look at. They mostly all start off as variants of interest and become variants of concern when displaying activities and properties of being more infectious, severe disease causing and bypassing the current vaccines."
He further added,
“But it is important to know where to draw that line, especially if the identification of a mutation or a variant is enough to raise a country from one level to another. Some believe that governments are slowly moving towards becoming risk averse.”
Steve Heapy, budget airline Jet2’s boss said,
“There's talk of a new variant and everything shuts down. Is that how it's going to be going forward? If it is, then they're trying to defeat mother nature - virus does have variants all the time."
According to Tim Alderslade, the chief executive of “Industry Body Airlines UK”, asserts that the sector isn’t calling for a reopening of travel everywhere. As per him,
"But if the government is going to have this kind of risk appetite...then it's going to be really difficult to see how we can have a summer season."
A spokesman on behalf of the Department for Transport affirmed,
"We have always been clear that protecting public health is our priority and that if decisive action was needed, it would be swiftly taken."
Foreign Travel Updates: Will Islands Reopen?
According to industry ideas, while the mainland like Greece and Spain might not be included in the green list, some of the Spanish and Greek islands will soon be on that green list.
The Island policy was used last year and Grant Shapps, the Transport Secretary asserted in April that this was something his department wanted to consider.
According to Dr. Pankhania,
“Healthcare facilities are limited and they can provide what they can and no more. There could come a time when a British holidaymaker is told, wait - we have Spanish people here who are sick and they could take priority, leaving holidaymakers stuck."
How Is The Green List Decided?
This is an aching point with the travel industry, which implies it doesn’t understand what points a country is among the different colors.
While the government has extended criteria like vaccination rates, variants, virus levels, and the quality of genomic sequencing that was offered by the country, it has not established the parameters of each leads to ensure moving up or down the list.
According to Mr. Heapy,
“We can't plan what we're doing. We've either got to assume all the destinations will be green, none of the destinations will be green, or use a lottery machine and try to work it out in the absence of a structured methodology."
Ultimately this decision de[ends completely on the other country’s data. Here the ministers are given information about other country’s positions by the Joint Biosecurity Centre. They also inform about the issues of other countries and also regulations regarding travel bans on US citizens 2021.
What Are All The Countries Doing?
There is nothing in the government’s guidelines about foreign office travel advice. Spain that is included in the amber list started to allow British travelers to enter their nation without the need of a covid test or even vaccination certificate.
Sophie Griffiths, Travel Trade Gazette editor said,
"It just beggars belief. Especially as countries are opening up and Britain is closing down. People are just confused and frustrated about why that's happening."
Johan Lundgren who is EasyJet’s boss asserted,
"This decision has cut Britain off from Europe and from the world for that matter - it's utterly confusing for the British people."
According to Dr. Pankhania,
"I can see where [travel bosses] are coming from. But from an infection control point of view, we are finely balanced now. We are nearly there - it would be better to be completely certain before opening the gates to all, [as] once opened, it is difficult to close them again."
