Welcome to Travel Well with Allan Wright!
Last week, Allan covered how to look up information on planning international travel during COVID. In this week’s episode, Allan discusses how to find more detailed information for how to plan European travel during COVID pandemic.
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Hi, this is Allan Wright. I’m the founder and owner of the Zephyr United Travel Collection and this is the Travel Well with Allan video update.
Last week, I talked to you about finding information about foreign countries during the pandemic in terms of three specific things:
- What’s the pandemic situation in a country that you’re considering traveling to?
- Are there restrictions for you to enter?
- What restrictions are in place in that country?
I ended that by previewing a little website that the European Union has created and it’s really not little, it’s very robust because it includes information on all the EU states and it answers all three of those questions for every country. So I’m going to share my screen here and take you to that website and show you a little bit about that and walk you through it.
This is the website it’s called Reopen EU. There’s a map here that’s similar to other maps. This one specifically shows the EU and also breaks it down not just by country but by region. You can see that, for example, here in norway they’ve got about eight different regions. They have four color codes: green, yellow, red, and purple. What I would like to show you is going to this section where you can search by country. So we’ll choose Italy because we love it and you’ve got three – four different sections here.
This is the health situation. This is the coronavirus measures in place in the country. This is travel and more information. So these three, the travel is can you get into that country; the health situation is what the pandemic situation is there right now; and the measures in place.
The answers to the three questions we brought up last week and so for each one of these you have these three different sections underneath the main sections and I just wanted to show you four of them today. Under health, I want to show you the second one which is the indicators of how the pandemic is doing. It gives you the new daily cases. You can see that this chart here is from February 21st through March 24th. It’s not great in Italy.
If we move on to the measures in place in the country. This first tab here talks about general measures in place and if you look at that, it talks about face masks, physical distancing, indoor and outdoor meetings, etc. And that’s pretty applicable because if you go to Italy right now if you were to be able to go to Italy you wouldn’t have a fun time anyway because not much is open and you can’t go outside and meet with other people
The second tab is interesting because it talks about the different regions because in some places like Italy. You can see that there are purple and there are red states and regions and there are different measures for this. So it talks about can I move throughout the country? All this isn’t that applicable right now for Italy because it’s not doing well but as it gets better this is the site that you’re going to want to use. You can go onto the site and use it for Iceland right now which is green and is open if you’ve been vaccinated.
This third one is the travel tab and the one that’s of most use to us is the second part which talks about traveling to Italy from areas outside the EU. You can see that they start out here with special rules for the UK for Brazil, for the countries here, Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Rwanda, South Korea, Thailand, and Singapore that are doing well with COVID.
Then they’ve got a little statement here that says for travelers coming from all other third countries travel is allowed only for specific reasons and not for tourism. You can’t go to Italy for tourism right now. Then it talks about the measures that if you could go to Italy you’d have to get through as well.
So this is a fantastic website. As I said, you know you’re not going to Italy right now but people are going to Iceland. They’re booking their trips and this would be very useful for that and as Italy, France, Spain, and the rest of them open up. This will be super useful for that as well. I hope this helps you plan European travel during COVID.
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