Million travel jobs on the line says industry chief

A travel industry leader has deplored the government’s increasing restrictions on international travel, saying ministers have “sacrificed” the industry.

Julia Lo Bue-Said, chief executive of Advantage Travel Partnership, was speaking hours after Portugal – the only mainstream holiday destination on the government’s quarantine-free “green list” – was moved to the “amber list”. Tens of thousands of British holidaymakers flew home with four days’ notice to avoid 10 days of self-isolation.

Seven more countries have been moved from the amber to the red list: Afghanistan, Bahrain, Costa Rica, Egypt, Sudan, Sri Lanka and Trinidad & Tobago. Anyone arriving in the UK who has been in any of these countries in the past 10 days must spend 11 nights in hotel quarantine at a price for a single traveller of £1,750.

In an online event for The Independent, the Advantage CEO said: “We are much further down the road than we were this time last year.

“We saw much more international travel resuming last year. We are now at the point where half our population are vaccinated, we’re doing a phenomenal job – best deployment of the vaccine across Europe – and yet we are being left behind.

“International travel and all that it delivers is being sacrificed on the back of that. We are not utilising our benefit of how successful the vaccine roll-out has been. Anyone who has taken the decision to travel gets no sympathy.

“The government needs to be basing their decisions on the facts, on data, to ensure Brits can travel safely.”

Announcing the short-notice change in Portugal’s status, the transport secretary, Grant Shapps, said: “The public has always known travel will be different this year and we must continue to take a cautious approach to reopening international travel in a way that protects public health and the vaccine rollout.”

The Labour Party has called for all amber list countries, including Portugal, to be placed on the red list.

But Ms Lo Bue-Said said: “We cannot go through another summer without meaningful destinations to sell.

“It’s really critical that we start to resume international travel in the next couple of weeks without fail.

“There are a million people whose jobs are on the line.”

Speaking about the Portugal move in Parliament on Monday, the health secretary, Matt Hancock, said: “The truth is that we acted, yes, on the scientific advice: the advice of the Joint Biosecurity Centre, based on the best information we had about this new variant — so-called delta AW, because it is a variant on the delta variant itself. We took that advice.

“Restoring international travel in the medium term is an incredibly important goal that we need to work to. It is going to be challenging and hard because of the risk of new variants, and variants popping up in places such as Portugal that otherwise have a relatively low case rate.

“But the biggest challenge and the reason this is so difficult is that a variant that undermines the vaccine effort would undermine the return to domestic freedom, and that must be protected at all costs.”

Ms Lo Bue-Said also criticised the failure of ministers to follow plans for a “green watchlist”, with adequate advance warning to allow for an orderly return when a green list country was at danger of moving to amber.

“The Global Travel Taskforce was aimed to ensure travellers could return safely through the green watchlist,” she said.

“At the first hurdle, the government have not even implemented and followed through on the policy that they approved.”

The next UK review of international travel ratings is due to take place on 24 June.