Tag Archives for coronavirus.
Currently Iceland requires 14 day quarantine for everyone arriving into the country. This requirement will be relaxed, with tourists being welcomed back with conditions, in three stages. Starting June 15 Americans will be able to visit, getting tested for COVID-19 on arrival.
Travel isn’t returning quickly to China, and if you want to see what two months into our future looks like the Chinese experience is certainly one clue. So is the risk of continued flare ups in the virus, which will scare people even further away from flying.
Airlines now require face masks for passengers to fly. But while they’ll make announcements prior to boarding, and enforce the requirement at the gate, the major airlines say they won’t enforce it to the point of diverting a flight is a passenger doesn’t wear a mask on board. They’ll still get a high degree of compliance, and that’s important.
Frontier Airlines will start requiring passengers to pass a temperature check to fly. Airline lobbyists, though, want to give the job of checking temperatures to the TSA. That will remove all responsibility for accuracy from the airlines and distract TSA from its security mission. This is a bad idea.
Right now people are fighting on board over lack of social distancing, although sometimes they’re just freaking out on social media about it.
People are getting pretty political over mask wearing and nearly every U.S. airline will begin requiring them. If folks want to boycott Costco, imagine once they are on board trapped inside a metal tube…?
The executive branch wants to give the CDC a mission: checking temperatures of airline passengers at 20 airports. The CDC, though, declined saying it wasn’t likely to be effective (due to asymptomatic spread) and it may not be legal. They responded to the Department of Homeland Security “Please kindly strike out CDC from this role.”
Even as Hawaii prepares a marketing campaign to bring back tourism calling the state ‘the safest place in the world’ for how well it has managed to contain COVID-19, it’s also ramping up restrictions on visitors – some designed to protect the state from coronavirus, others clearly motivated by an antipathy towards outsiders coming from the mainland.
For better or worse – and opinions in the comments here are split – many well-known commentators are convinced that Americans will be mostly living their normal life by this summer.
That means traveling – and it perhaps even means socially-distanced Disney World in the manner of Shanghai Disney with limits of 20% of capacity and very frequent cleaning.
A reader who spent 10 weeks in Europe last year misses being back and wonders whether any travel – let alone international travel – will be possible until there’s a vaccine.
And the answer is yes for most – but not for those who are older with pre-existing health conditions.
The Points Guy ran a video by Brian Kelly arguing “against any unnecessary travel at all.” I’m not persuaded, and hashing this out publicly should help people make up their own mind.
It can certainly make sense to do limited domestic travel this summer if you aren’t living in a coronavirus hotspot, aren’t heading towards one, and are not in a high risk group (and do not live or work with people that are). I’m not telling anyone that they should travel for leisure but the argument doesn’t hold that no one should.
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 »
