What is the point of a 'travel corridor' with a country we can't even enter?
Thailand and Singapore have the 'green light' – but this ultimately means nothing, says Lottie Gross
It’s Friday, and that can only mean one thing: the weekly travel toll was sounded last night.
The two latest victims in the government’s new game of real-life Need for Speed, in which travellers must rush home from their holidays by any means necessary before an arbitrary deadline or risk an unenforced quarantine, are Guadeloupe (sorry, where?) and Slovenia.
I’ll be surprised if we see hundreds of people rushing back from the Caribbean island, a French overseas region, but it’s a real shame for anyone who has been sunning themselves on Slovenia's Mediterranean coast or hiking in the Julian Alps.
The good news, though, is that both Singapore and Thailand have been added to the Travel Corridor list. Singapore Slings and pad Thai, here I come… Or not.
Don’t get booking your flights to Phuket just yet, and certainly don’t pack your linens for an evening at the Raffles – you might be ‘allowed’ to travel, according to the Government, but you’ll have a task on your hands getting into either of these south-east Asian countries.
As one of Telegraph Travel’s reporters on the ground wrote earlier this week, Thailand has all but closed its borders to foreign visitors. Unless you’re a diplomat, have permission directly from the Prime Minister (does anyone have a number, by the way?), or have a specific type of visa or a handful of other niche circumstances, you’re simply not allowed in. And anyone that is allowed has to follow a rigorous exercise in bureaucracy and begging.
In Singapore, short term visitors from anywhere are banned – unless you have extenuating circumstances. Does an increasingly incompetent Government count, I wonder? Possibly not. Longer stays are allowed, but you must get a “valid approval letter” – cue more begging – a Covid test on arrival, and then isolate for 14 days at a government-approved hotel to the tune of $2,000 (£1,135). I don’t know about you, but I had something more exciting than the four walls of a hotel room in mind for my next trip.
So what’s the point? Why is our government building air bridges to countries we aren’t allowed into? Has the Rt Hon Grant Shapps MP really not heard that we’re one of the least desirable populations for travel right now, with sharply rising cases and a test and trace system that is struggling to test and trace.
This isn’t the first time it’s happened, either. Take a look at our fabled 'travel corridors' list – under normal circumstances this would be a veritable bucket list, really. But right now, it’s a roll call of disappointment. A holiday to Hong Kong? Nope, non-residents are banned. Winter in Fiji sounds nice, doesn’t it? Well it would, but their borders have been closed for months. As have the borders of the Cayman Islands, Mauritius and Vietnam, which all apparently have travel corridors with the UK.
Of course, inbound tourism could benefit from these new rules, but with Singapore, any residents returning from the UK still be issued with a Stay At Home notice and have to pay for a Covid test on arrival. And the rigmarole for Thai residents simply isn't worthwhile – no one needs to see the Tower of London that badly.
With so many of these corridors seeming one-sided, it begs the question: what’s really behind this? Pressure from the travel industry has no doubt put fire up the backsides of the FCDO and DfT, but the results of their efforts are all too often pointless. When we said we wanted permission to travel, this confusing, futile game of Snakes and Ladders is not what we had in mind.
Perhaps, if I might offer some advice Mr Shapps, you could put these playground practices of naming Britain’s new best friends aside and instead help your dear colleague Mr Hancock organise a testing program that not only helps us get back to school or work or wherever we want to be, but that also enables travellers to safely leave and re-enter the UK from the destinations that are really rather divine at this time of year.
With our flu season approaching, surely you’d rather I was safe on the sands of the Fuerteventura than stuck on the tube with a bunch of sweaty, morning-breathy strangers?
