Category Archives for Destinations.
Uzbekistan has a new “Safe travel GUARANTEED” program to support tourism. They’re willing to pay out $3000 to any tourist who gets Covid-19 during their visit to the country.
The Bahamas is trumpeting their re-opening plan to welcome tourists. Americans can visit with a negative Covid-19 PCR test and filling out a health screening.
The Covid-19 test just has to be within 10 days of travel. That’s convenient given how backed up testing is in the U.S. But it’s also useless – in fact a positive test that’s 10 days old might be better!
Travel doesn’t just face risk from COVID-19, but from the response to COVID-19, and more importantly from changes in that response. In other words regime uncertainty.
The Lt. Governor says the August 1 re-opening date will be pushed back, even though people have bought their tickets and made plans. Instead he says it’ll be postponed indefinitely, until a time that gets announced two weeks prior to re-opening. But it’s ultimately the governor’s decision, and he may or may not have made it yet.
Australia has fewer than 8500 total confirmed cases of COVID-19. The country’s success appears to be a combination of effective policy response and luck.
International arrivals of their own citizens required quarantine. But it’s those quarantine facilities that are the site of a new virus outbreak in Melbourne – and also of a sex scandal. Because the guards were having sex with the passengers being quarantined, and exposing themselves to the virus.
Tourists would come see the monkeys. TNow the government of Thailand is engaged in a sterilization campaign to keep monkeys in check since the lack of free bananas has led the monkeys to violence.
A new bill would allow the state’s Department of Health to place people arriving with COVID-19 into “isolation” not merely quarantine, separating them from their families. Critics have likened this to placing people in “camps.”
Hawaii has imposed a 14-day mandatory quarantine on arrival since late March. That order currently extends through July 31, but will be extended.
What’s new is that Hawaii will offer an option to avoid quarantine. Arriving passengers with a negative test for COVID-19 from the previous 72 hours, will be exempted. The state will also be implementing temperature screening at airports.
Right now much of the world is closed to U.S. tourism. On the whole the Caribbean is opening, and the Maldives opens July 15. Turkey and Serbia are open. But most of the world that will accept Americans at least requires coronavirus testing on arrival or two week quarantine.
The E.U. is trying to come up with a list of countries whose citizens will be allowed to enter starting July 1. The U.S. isn’t expected to be on it.
One man couldn’t handle Hawaii’s mandatory quarantine on arrival. Ten days in he hit the ocean, and that’s where he died. The 39 year old man, from Tulsa, Oklahoma, was found by a fisherman at Diamond Head near Honolulu.
This is hardly peak tourist season for Dubai, with daily temperatures averaging about 100 degrees. Still, staying somewhere like Al Maha Desert Resort seems fantastic for social distancing. You get your own standalone villa with your own private pool. When I was there you could choose to take all of your meals in-villa too as part of the resort’s all-inclusive approach. And redemptions are available every day using Marriott points.
Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
