In April 2010, in the biggest disruption since the second world war drifted across the northern hemisphere. Thousands of planes across Europe were stranded at their stands by the volcanic eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland. About 20 countries had to close their airspace and an estimated 10 million travelers were affected.
A decade later, the effects of that pyroclastic pimple now seem like a light dusting compared to the utter devastation that the COVID-19 pandemic is causing to international travel on a global scale.
In one sense, the situation is very clear at the moment – even if your country is one of the few that hasn’t banned travel (UK – we are looking at you), good luck finding a flight and a destination to whisk you away. And even if you did get somewhere, you’d most likely have to spend 14 days in quarantine, which would rather disrupt that long weekend in Porto.
It’s likely that this will be the situation until at least the end of May. But that’s when things will get tricky. The economies of many countries depend on tourism and they will want to get that business up and running as soon as possible. Yet, this week, the Australian government have been giving out the message, not to expect international travel until 2021.
A Pandemic Passport
Undoubtedly we will enter a long period of uncertainty and confusion when different countries will open up at different times and have different rules for visitors, depending on each country’s stage in squashing their outbreak. And yes, a Corona-Visa and Pandemic Passports will likely be things we may need to travel. Some airlines are already doing rapid COVID-19 tests before boarding.
To help you navigate the complexity of what’s happening, what’s not happening and what’s going to happen, we have added coronavirus travel guides for every country.
On these pages, you will see the latest status on the pandemic in that country and a map showing the current availability of travel to that country. We will also add any country to country-specific information.
Coronvirus Travel Guides
The world’s most visited countries:
As mentioned, there’s not a lot to see right now – most maps are all red, but we know that millions of you use our site each month to find out the dates of public holidays, so we hope you find this a useful resource in the coming months as we pull ourselves out of this situation.
It’s also worth mentioning that we are also updating our holiday pages with information about cancelled festivals and when we find it.
