Category Archives: Travel

Vaccinated Britons can travel ‘without looking over their shoulder’, says Shapps – video

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Fully vaccinated Britons will not have to quarantine on return from France and Spain for the next three weeks, bringing much needed business to the struggling tourism sector, according to the transport secretary.

But Britons will need to be fully vaccinated against Covid-19 'for evermore' in order to travel between countries, Grant Shapps has predicted, suggesting that quarantine restrictions for some arrivals in England will remain in place into the autumn.

Shapps said it was vital to 'protect the domestic unlocking' after the latest changes were announced to the traffic light system that grades destinations according to their case, vaccine and variant numbers

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Why are low-risk countries on the Covid travel ‘red list’? | Letters

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Dr Peninah Murage says the unjust traffic light system penalises poor countries even though some have relatively low numbers of cases. Plus Dot Mornington-West on being under house arrest after returning from France

Can the Guardian please investigate the rationale behind the Covid travel restrictions relating to “red list” countries? Some of the countries on the red list, such as Kenya, have very low Covid cases and deaths, but are among the world’s poorest and with little influence on government policy.

Essentially, the UK government is using this list to appease the public who need to see the government doing something – but at the same time the government is assured that the backlash will be minimal because these countries have very little voice.

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Johnson dumps ‘amber watchlist’ plan as it emerges top adviser has quit

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Proposals for tougher quarantine rules for some holidaymakers killed off after cabinet revolt

Boris Johnson has ditched plans for tougher quarantine restrictions for some holidaymakers after days of chaos, as it emerged the chief of the Joint Biosecurity Centre that advises on travel rules has departed the job leaving it “rudderless”.

After a revolt in the cabinet and a backlash from the travel industry, government sources said the prime minister would not be going ahead with proposals for a new “amber watchlist” to warn travellers which countries were at risk of turning red.

Cabinet sources said the plans were killed off by the Treasury and Department for Transport, as ministers grow in confidence about the drop in cases, which fell to 21,052 on Monday.

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UK poised to end amber list quarantine for people vaccinated in US and EU

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Ministers to discuss plans, with talks also to determine if they will apply to England only or all UK nations

Plans to significantly open up international travel are expected to be announced on Wednesday, with UK ministers poised to let people who have been fully vaccinated in the US and EU avoid quarantine if arriving from amber list countries.

The move would benefit millions of people by finally letting them be reunited with family and friends based in the UK, as well as businesses in the aviation and tourism sectors that have been hit hard by the pandemic.

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Jungle Cruise review – the Rock’s Disney theme-park actioner takes predictable turns

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Emily Blunt and Dwayne Johnson are romancing riverboat adventurers in a ride-turned-film that quickly becomes bland

The Jungle Cruise theme-park ride is a riverboat trip that Disneyland visitors have been queuing up for since the 1950s: an old-timey craft travelling down an artificial jungle river, with a jolly captain pointing out animatronic animals lurching out of the artificial undergrowth. Now it’s been adapted into a blandly inoffensive piece of generic entertainment: screenwriters Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (who once gave us Bad Santa and I Love You Phillip Morris) have mashed up The African Queen with Raiders of the Lost Ark, and with what I admit is a surreal splash of Aguirre, Wrath of God.

It’s lively enough for the first 20 minutes. The year is 1916, and Emily Blunt plays Lily Houghton, a haughty yet idealistic British scientist, much patronised by the male establishment in London. She imperiously hires a riverboat in Brazil to find the much-rumoured “Tree of Life” somewhere in the jungle. Its captain is a cynical-with-a-heart-of-gold rogue called Frank Wolff, man-mountainishly played by Dwayne Johnson. After the traditional meet-cute, their growing romance plays off the comedy turn provided by Jack Whitehall, playing the other passenger: Lily’s foppish, neurotic younger brother MacGregor. At one stage, Whitehall’s prissy, wussy Englishman explains to Dwayne Johnson that he is gay – or rather, he says something indirect about being not as other men, and the subject is never raised again, Edwardian reticence dovetailing nicely with Disney family values. It is a stereotype that Walt himself might have recognised, while also approving of the obvious heterosexuality of Frank with his muscles, boots and sailor’s cap.

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Stay calm and look fabulous: Holiday hassle and how to avoid it

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Driving, packing, parenting while driving … yes, summer holidays are here to torment us. Handily, so are Guardian writers on how to negotiate them

My holiday road rage is directed inward – at my own failures and miscalculations – although I accept it will not feel like that if you are sitting next to me. Sometimes these episodes are all I remember of the trips in question: running out of petrol halfway across a suspension bridge; the satnav voice that switched to Italian midway through a journey; that hyena I nearly hit in the middle of a hailstorm.

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‘I had a crush on my sexy manager’: seven readers on their summers of love

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A virtual lockdown date that blossomed, an encounter on a backpackers’ bus and a school trip to Spain – readers share their most memorable summer romances

After just one week of living in New York, the city locked down, and a summer of love seemed unlikely. I did go on a series of virtual dates, with around 20 guys over four months; some were funny, kind and smart, and some were a little weird. One or two of them became my friends. Then, I finally got a call from Mr Right on the long weekend of 4 July. We started talking and he was everything I’d hoped for – except he was in Michigan, hundreds of miles away. In early August, he casually mentioned he’d be coming to NYC to meet me, and the next day he drove for 10 hours to take me for dinner.

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Sun, swimming, smoking and seagulls: a day in the life of beach hut Britain

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Across the UK, there are long waiting lists for a beach hut – and prices go up and up. A day on Hove promenade reveals why they are so popular and the problems that persist (mainly locks)

Everyone who meets Bonny Holland says the same thing: she really loves beach huts. “Bonny posts in our Facebook group about four times a day,” says the Hove and Portslade councillor Robert Nemeth, who founded the Hove Beach Hut Association. “I have to approve the posts.”

Inside Holland’s beach hut, the 62-year-old retired headteacher keeps a double-ring stove, a frying pan, a griddle pan, graffiti removal wipes, and, best of all, a loo. “You sit on this,” Holland says merrily, unfolding a portable toilet seat for my benefit, “and go in here.”

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Europe’s unluckiest train station gets new lease of life as hotel

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Once-grand Canfranc was known as the Titanic of the mountains, but fell into disrepair thanks to fire, derailment and war

It earned the nickname “Titanic of the mountains”, but now the monumental and ill-fated train station at Canfranc is to get a new life as a five-star hotel, 51 years after the international rail link across the Pyrenees closed.

The story of Canfranc, a village more than 1,000 metres (3,280ft) above sea level on the Franco-Spanish frontier, is one of vainglorious ambition and abject failure, of incompetence and corruption, of intrigue, smuggling and a century-long run of bad luck.

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10 of Croatia’s best crowd-free places in for a

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With Croatia set to go on to the green list, we pick quiet islands and beaches for a post-lockdown escape


Last summer, visitors who managed to make it to Croatia had a taste of what the country was like before the days of mass tourism. And it tasted good. But while honeypots such as Dubrovnik were unrecognisably quiet, there have always been parts of the country where you don’t have to wade through crowds.

Places where things move at a less hurried pace, where Croatian life can be savoured, where you get a flavour of what the Dalmatians call fjaka – the art of doing nothing. These islands and mainland destinations are what you want in a post-lockdown escape: peace, beauty and the chance to discover why Croatia is such an enticing country.

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Balearic Islands to be added to England’s Covid amber list

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Change means some people will have to quarantine when arriving in England from Monday, as red and green lists also updated

Ministers have performed a U-turn on the Balearic Islands by removing the Spanish holiday destination from the UK’s quarantine-free “green list” after only two weeks, in a move which will force holidaymakers to cancel plans or self-isolate for up to 10 days upon return.

However, summer holidays to budget holiday destination Bulgaria looked more likely after it was upgraded to the green list alongside Hong Kong. Croatia and Taiwan will be placed on the green watchlist – designed to give people some notice a country might be downgraded.

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Irish people in Britain to get green light to visit friends and family

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Europe’s strictest border controls to be relaxed as Ireland prepares to allow visits for essential reasons

Up to 400,000 Irish people in Britain are to be given the green light to visit family and friends at home for the first time in six months as Ireland prepares to lift the strictest border controls in Europe.

Only those with essential reasons such as haulage, health or funeral attendance have been allowed to enter the country since the border restrictions were imposed in January.

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Travel exemptions rise as more Australians apply to fly overseas

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Rejections are also increasing, with Australian Border Force knocking back more than 10,000 applicants in June

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The number of Australians applying to travel overseas is surging, leading to an increase in exemptions despite efforts to crack down on unnecessary travel.

According to a Guardian Australia analysis of Australian Border Force statistics, 34,616 exemptions were sought in June, up from 23,836 in May.

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Britons with Indian-made AstraZeneca vaccine face extra EU travel hurdle

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EU vaccine passport scheme omits Covishield jab, despite it offering same protection as UK-made one

British travellers hoping to visit Europe this summer face an extra hurdle as it emerged that those vaccinated with Indian-manufactured AstraZeneca jabs would not automatically skip quarantine.

Under the EU vaccine passport scheme, people given the AstraZeneca jab produced by the Serum Institute of India (SII) would not automatically avoid quarantine and mandatory testing when travelling in Europe.

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Covid tourism freeze could cost global economy $4tn by year end

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Turkey, Ecuador and South Africa will be among hardest hit as pandemic-related losses reach $2.4tn, says UN report

The cost to the global economy of the tourism freeze caused by Covid-19 could reach $4tn (£2.9tn) by the end of this year, a UN body has said, with the varying pace of vaccine rollouts expected to cost developing nations and tourist centres particularly dear.

Nations including Turkey and Ecuador will be among the hardest hit by the severe disruption to international tourism, with holiday favourites such as Spain, Greece and Portugal also badly affected. Pandemic-related losses have reached up to $2.4tn this year, according to a report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (Unctad). The potential lost tourism-related income in 2021 is equivalent to the effect of switching off 85% of the UK economy, while projected losses over 2020 and 2021 could equate to removing Germany from the global economy for two years.

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‘It opened my eyes’: Lesotho ski resort goes off-piste to keep workers

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The pandemic has hit tourism but retraining and a range of initiatives have enabled staff to stay and even hit the slopes

Masiane Nthina made her way nervously from the kit room to the slopes. Shuffling with skis on her feet for the first time is not easy.

Nthina, an intern at the Lesotho Tourism Development Corporation, lives close to Afriski Mountain Resort, but had never visited it. She had always viewed the resort as the preserve of the elite and thought that on her meagre wages she could not afford to go.

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Mystery of the wheelie suitcase: how gender stereotypes held back the history of invention

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Why have some brilliant innovations – from rolling luggage to electric cars – taken so long to come to market? Macho culture has a lot to answer for

In 1972 an American luggage executive unscrewed four castors from a wardrobe and fixed them to a suitcase. Then he put a strap on his contraption and trotted it gleefully around his house.

This was how Bernard Sadow invented the world’s first rolling suitcase. It happened roughly 5,000 years after the invention of the wheel and barely one year after Nasa managed to put two men on the surface of the moon using the largest rocket ever built. We had driven an electric rover with wheels on a foreign heavenly body and even invented the hamster wheel. So why did it take us so long to put wheels on suitcases? This has become something of a classic mystery of innovation.

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New network of European sleeper trains announced

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A French start-up aims to run ‘hotels on rails’ from Paris to 12 cities across Europe, including Edinburgh, from 2024

Less than a decade after Europe’s night trains appeared to have reached the end of the line, a new French start-up has announced plans for a network of overnight services out of Paris from 2024.

Midnight Trains is hoping post-Covid interest in cleaner, greener travel will generate interest in its proposed “hotels on rails”, which aims to connect the French capital to 12 other European destinations, including Edinburgh.

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Can Hawaii reset its stressed out tourism industry after the pandemic?

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The islands has been feeling the weight of a tourism industry that has ballooned to what many believe is beyond the islands’ capacity

On a recent Sunday morning, Makua Beach looks like the picture of paradise.

A stretch of soft, yellow sand lies on a strip of land between the lush Waianae mountain range and the deep blue Pacific Ocean on the north-west coast of Oahu. Waves crash against rocks along the beach, and a monk seal can be seen swimming near the shore.

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