UK’s Quarantine Strategy Leaves It Out of Step With Europe’s Summer Season
Photo Credit: Will London have any semblance of a summer season? Unsplash / Aron Van de Pol
Skift Take
During the coronavirus pandemic, Britain has been something of an outlier in Europe — and not in a good way. As travel reopens on the continent, the travel industry is loudly questioning the logic of its quarantine and proposing a better way.
The reopening strategy laid out by the UK government has raised everything from eyebrows to ire as the summer season nears.
As of June 8, all entrants to the UK are subject to a 14-day quarantine. However, the resources available to enforce this rule have been called insufficient, and the logic of introducing such a hardcore rule this late in the pandemic is a major point of contention.
As a result, the tourism and aviation industries are lobbying hard against the quarantine, including launching a legal challenge and backing the alternative idea of travel corridors. They argue the quarantine will act as a deterrent on future bookings that will stymie any hope of a recovery in the coming months.
"The quarantine is a considerable frustration and we haven’t seen the science behind it — we're not sure that there is actually strong science behind it," Kurt Janson, head of Tourism Alliance, an umbrella trade association for the tourism sector in the UK, said. "It’s
