The entire travel industry cannot be sustained on a diet of Malta and Ibiza alone

Patience is a virtue, they say.

Perhaps it’s best that “they” had never met the phalanx of grumpy travel journalists and millions of hopeful-to-holiday Britons who were waiting for the promised update to the green list on Thursday evening.

As the clock ticked past 7pm – far beyond acceptable wine time, and pointless because Northern Ireland and Scotland had already broken the news – I was feeling distinctly unvirtuous. Jobs, travelling to see family and, yes, holidays, depended on this announcement; and ministers had thoughtlessly left us waiting all day without so much as a sniff as to when we might hear. Was Grant Shapps finishing his dinner first? I would have quite liked to eat mine, too.

And yet when the Department for Transport list finally did arrive – at 7.35pm – it was still met with confusion, and eventually dismay.

While Malta finally went “fully” green, various other holiday islands, including Madeira and the Balearics, were added to the new “green watchlist”, signalling that they were at risk of turning amber at a moment’s notice. Not exactly solid ground on which to book a holiday. Naturally, there were a few comic additions: the British bit of Antarctica (weather -50C today, with added wind-chill) and the Pacific’s Pitcairn Islands, their choppy waters accessible only by boat.

Ministers say they’re being “cautious”. Is that why virtually all European countries, many of which have infection levels far below that of the UK, were still graded amber? Or why it’s going to take until “late summer” for fully vaccinated travellers to be able to skip quarantine? And why ministers are still telling holidaymakers not to holiday in amber countries? (Totally legal, by the way.) Meanwhile, airlines and holiday firms are watching the summer drip away. An industry cannot be sustained on a diet of Malta and Ibiza alone.

What are we waiting for?

Yours,

Cathy Adams

Travel editor