Welcome to Travel Well with Allan Wright!
In this week’s episode, Allan discusses how to plan international travel during COVID by showing you what websites to use to look for pertinent information regarding each countries restrictions and procedures.
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Can’t watch the video right now? Here’s the video transcript of How To Plan International Travel During COVID:
Hi, my name is Allan Wright. I’m the founder and president of the Zephyr United Travel Collection which includes Taste Vacations and Zephyr Adventures and I’m here to talk about the Travel Well with Allan video update, helping you with your travel decisions during the pandemic.
Today I’d like to talk about the issue of where do you get information when you’re thinking about traveling abroad and I think you’ve got three things to consider.
Number one is – is it safe to go there? What’s the pandemic situation there right now?
Number two is – can you get into that country? And there are restrictions for almost all countries right now. Usually a testing requirement, a testing with quarantine which sort of rules out tourism, and exceptions made for people who are vaccinated.
And number three is – if you can get into a country for tourism, what are is the situation there now
in terms of travel and tourism? Can you eat in a restaurant? Can you travel from state to state within that country? Because if you have a lot of restrictions, it’s not maybe worth going there even if you can get in.
So what I’m going to do is I’m going to share my screen with you and walk you through a couple of the websites that I like to use. So number one is how the situation is in each country and I like to go to CDC travel restrictions COVID. And you can see the COVID-19 travel recommendations by destination pops up and this is a really useful site to give you that general overview. There’s a lot of data out there but the CDC which is our expert agency has basically said.
Here is the situation for travelers in the world and you can see it’s color-coded and those colors are by risk assessment level and much of the world is in level four but there are some places that are not and you can go down and look at your individual country.
See there’s level four most of the world, there’s level three, and we at Zephyr will only take people right now on our tours to level one and level two areas that includes Thailand, for example, that includes Singapore. So some places that are interesting, Iceland, to travel. And level one is even lower – Australia, New Zealand, etc and you can click on one of these.
Let’s just take Singapore as an example and it will give you more information but I find that the travel requirements and all that are are general and they’re not super specific for that country. Probably a lot of the information is copied from one country to the next.
Once I look at the risk assessment level for travelers in the country with the CDC website then I like to go on and get other information elsewhere. Let’s just continue with Singapore. If you type in Singapore COVID travel restrictions then the first thing that usually comes up for whatever country you’re choosing is information put out by that country’s government and here’s the ministry of foreign affairs but a lot of times I find that this is complex. For one thing, they’re not talking directly to the U.S. citizen or whatever country you want, where you’re located and for another, it’s maybe not in English. And it’s often confusing and convoluted. You can see on this website you have to click on another thing to get a bunch of case statistics. It talks about these different policies. It’s very complex.
So here’s what I like to do and this is my big tip for the day is – I go to the U.S. embassy. In this case, Singapore and type in travel COVID restrictions and the first one that comes up you see is the U.S. embassy in Singapore. You can type that in and look that up. The beauty of this and you can do this for any country in the world essentially, is that it’s tailored to U.S. citizens in English specifically answering our questions.
Are PCR tests available there? How are they available? Vaccine information. Are there entry and exit requirements for U.S. citizens? Yes, you can enter subject to restrictions. Below you’ll find out that what that really means is you can’t enter without a serious quarantine period, even if you get tested Movement restrictions, curfew in place, etc. So in terms of finding information about a specific country travel restrictions and what’s happening there, go to the U.S. embassy in that country and I think you’ll be pleased.
I do want to bring up one more site. It’s called Reopen EU and I’m not going to do that this time. In fact, I’m going to cover that in next week’s video. This is a great website that is similar to the CDC site but also has all that information that each embassy site has and you can get it all in one for Europe. It’s very complex. I’m not going to do it this week, instead, I’ll do it for next week’s video where we’ll cover travel restrictions and travel movement in Europe.
Hopefully, that helps you plan international travel during COVID. Thanks.
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