So, before the whole pandemic, we had been planning a trip to Italy this summer before S21 heads to college. Sort of the last big family vacation. By end of May, all 4 of us will be fully vaccinated and DH thinks that things will be open enough for us to go at beginning of August. I am a little wary - what if things change again? I would hate to be in a position where we could not get back to the US. He thinks I am being overly cautious.
Thoughts?
This summer my DD is going to complete her study abroad that got canceled last summer. Its the lat summer she can do it and itâs fully paid and not refundable. Itâs five weeks. We are then taking a 2-week family trip to the Caribbean. We are both vaccinated, bought travel insurance, and willing to take the risk.
Iâd be worried too. We opted to not try our Europe trip until â22.
We are more concerned that things would be shut down while traveling or highly restricted and we wouldnât get to visit what we wanted.
To take a big trip like that I would have to be comfortable to go with little to no reservation (in my mind). Even more than your actual traveling (plane and such) I would look more closely at where you want to go and how covid accomodations will affect your trip. Are things open in the countries you want to visit? Limitations? Current COVID rates and howâs vaccination going in those places?
We also had a planned trip to Italy this year but pushing it to next year. Some parts of Italy just got off a lockdown. As mentioned above, if Iâm going to travel I want to be able to see/do everything and Iâm not so sure that is possible this year.
For now, if we are going to travel it will be domestic.
We debated this same thing. We came close to booking a family getaway to Mexico for a week. But when I looked the requirements and thought about the fact that there are still a large number of out of control cases there, possibly getting stuck in Mexico, having to go hospital there, plus their own requirements for testing,etc⊠we decided to hold off.
We are going to the UK for a wedding in August. Hubby is British, all his family are vaxxed, as are we. Theyâve done a good job with handling the vaccination program there. We arenât worried about getting stuck in the UK. So we are going, as long as we donât have to quarantine in a hotel when we arrive. We have to check on that.
I have trips planned to the UK for September and Christmas to visit family. I may add other work trips to the UK and/or Europe but probably not until the fall, because uncertainty over testing requirements makes it hard to know exactly what will be needed.
As far as the rest of Europe goes, it seems clear that Spain, Portugal and Greece will open up, because they need the money, but Italy is more uncertain. So I would be reasonably comfortable booking a trip to Spain or Greece, but Iâd worry that a lot of things in Italy will still be closed or heavily restricted. I do think it also depends how much you want to visit churches, museums etc and how much you want to go to wineries and beaches.
Hereâs the dilemma. Countries that welcome Americans are the ones that, generally speaking, donât have the pandemic under control. The countries that have the pandemic under control donât want Americans to visit, at least not yet.
I would be worried that the places I wanted to go and the things that I wanted to see might not be open. We decided not to do any international travel until late this year or early next year.
We debated up until the last possible minute about taking a nice family foreign trip celebrating med school ladâs graduation from med school the end of May. Our final choice open possibility was Africa, but instead, weâre taking a rain check and just spending two weeks in two cottages on the St Lawrence River enjoying the view and a bit of âgame timeâ (something our family loves). Iâve invested the money and will see how things look next year or the year after when âresidentâ lad will have his next two weeks off.
H and I then debated going overseas by ourselves in August for our Anniversary. Weâre fully vaccinated. (All of us are fully vaccinated by the May trip too.) But the rest of the world isnât yet, so Amtrak exploring the US came out on top as our choice. Weâre really looking forward to seeing the scenery via rails.
Seeing what is going on in India right now when they thought they were close to herd immunity by 50% of their people testing positive for having had Covid makes us glad we chose what we did. On the train we can be as private as we choose (we have a roomette) or not, pending how things play out between now and then.
Weâre flexible in things we enjoy, so had no problem adjusting as necessary for Covid even if they arenât the same things we would have done without it.
Look up the international travel advisories. Most are Do Not Travel (level 4) due to covid. That includes Italy, Germany, Greece, Spain, France, Mexico and UK Also included is just about everywhere else too (think I heard 80 percent of countries are DNT). Even if vaccinated I donât think traveling to a country who has restrictions in place and tourist spots closed would be very fun.
Of course thatâs got nothing to do with infection rates: in the UK they are one tenth the level of the US. But it does raise the question of whether travel insurance is even valid if you travel to somewhere on the DNT list.
We are hoping to travel this summer and/or fall. However, we have not booked anything specifically because we do not know what will be open. We had a trip for next week cancelled because Canada is not letting people in yet. Anything that you or I book for this summer has the real possibility of suffering the same fate.
I think that we just have to be patient and see what happens.
I looked up UK and it looks like they will make more decisions on whatâs required of tourists at end of May. Most likely the US will be on their âgreen listâ of countries. But they may still require a covid test prior travel and another after arrival even if vaccinated.
If your main interest is visiting family that is one thing but the museums being closed and restaurants/pubs just now reopening to outside seating with limited capacity tends to put a damper on fun.
The expectation is that all restrictions will be lifted on June 17 (supposedly allowing for concerts and large indoor events). What they havenât dealt with yet is whether vaccinated people wonât need to test. The biggest problem with UK tourism this summer is that because of doubts about whether travel abroad will be permitted, holiday accommodation in the UK is in desperately short supply. But nice London hotels might be something of an exception.
The policy that I bought covered Covid-related risks and had no country exclusions. They want people to travel.
I know so many people who are planning an Italy trip for 2022. Many of them had hopes for 2020 or 2021. I personally think 2022 will be an awful year to travel to popular destinations, primarily due to overcrowding from pent-up demand.
Weâd like to travel somewhere internationally later this year, and I think the lockdown/travel situation will improve quite a bit by fall.
I look at the US where we went from vaccine scarcity to vaccine abundance in roughly 3.5 months (140+ million with at least one dose), and consider that we (the US) has hogged a disproportionate percentage of worldwide vaccine supply. That supply in the US will now start to become available to other countries which should significantly speed up their vaccine rollout programs. So I expect tens if not hundreds of millions more doses to hit the worldwide market over the next few months, which is a good thing for opening up economies and travel.
We didnât âhog itâ we paid for it to get produced.
Demand in other countries is highâand of course criminals are cashing in. Germany and Mexico have seized big batches of counterfeit vaccine, Canât imagine that it isnât getting more widespreadâanything to cash in on misery.
I am worried that it wonât really be worth going. DH saw this article and started getting excited about it but I think itâs premature: Bloomberg - Are you a robot?