Travel & Leisure

Spain hoping to welcome tourists from next month

Welcome: the Costa del Sol which is hugely popular with Irish holiday-makers

SPAIN hopes to reopen to overseas holidaymakers from next month under the Covid digital health certificate scheme, the country’s secretary of state for tourism has said.

Fernando Valdés told the recent World Travel & Tourism Council summit in Mexico that the programme – under which tourists could show they have been vaccinated, tested negative or recently recovered from the virus – would prove “fundamental to offering travellers certainty”.

Valdés said Spain would participate in a pilot digital certificate scheme this month and would be “ready to receive visitors in June”. He said the new scheme – and Spain’s vaccine rollout – represented “a before and an after” in comparison with the situation last year, but stressed the certificates were “not a magic wand”.

What they did offer, he said, in comments reported by the Spanish news agency Europa Press, was a degree of security because they would allow tourists to travel if they had been vaccinated, if they had tested negative despite not having had the jab, or if they had already recovered from Covid.

Spain, which depends on tourism for about 12% of its GDP, is in its fourth wave of the pandemic. To date, coronavirus has infected 3,496,134 people in the country and claimed 77,855 lives.

Efforts to vaccinate Spain’s population of about 47 million people are gathering pace, with 14,994,667 doses of the vaccine administered, and 4,020,945 people already receiving both doses.

The country’s socialist-led coalition government has said it is aiming to have 70% of the population vaccinated by the end of the summer.

News of the planned reopening came as it emerged that talks over the mechanics of reopening travel routes between the UK and the European Union over the summer holidays will open with Brussels within days.

Officials in the EU are working on a proposal for the mutual recognition of Covid passports, which will contain information on vaccines administered to the holder and recent test results.

EU countries with large tourist sectors are also pushing for the European commission to co-ordinate with other member states and also the UK.

Aer Lingus opens up to Barbados and NYC

BY FIONN DAVENPORT

AER Lingus has announced new services from its recently established hub in Manchester to New York, Orlando and Barbados. The non-stop daily service from Manchester to New York JFK and Orlando will start on July 29, with three-times weekly service to Barbados starting on October 20. A Boston service will begin in summer 2022.

The Iights will be operated by Aer Lingus (UK) Limited, which is a UK-incorporated subsidiary of Aer Lingus Limited, and will operate Iights under the oneworld joint venture, using BA’s code on its Iights (which would allow them to be sold through British Airways).

The New York and Boston services will be operated by Aer Lingus’ three new longrange narrow-body A321LR aircraft – making it the Srst airline to operate regular transatlantic Iights with this Airbus craft. The Orlando and Barbados routes will be served by a wide-body A330.

Aer Lingus’ chief commercial oTcer, David Shepherd, said: “We are delighted to offer high- quality, direct, nonstop, business and leisure travel options, at very reasonable prices for travellers and holidaymakers across the North of England.”

“Aer Lingus has been Iying to North America for more than 60 years and we also have a proud history with Manchester Airport,” he added.

The new Manchester hub is an important development for Aer Lingus as well as a direct challenge to Dublin, but the airline says that the new services are a complement to its ‘Dub Hub’ strategy and that it will continue to connect UK and European customers to the US via Dublin. THE Orient Express have announced that three new routes are being added so that the train takes in evergreater swathes of Europe’s most beautiful scenery. The first will connect Amsterdam and Venice, with stops in Brussels and Paris, while the second will run from Rome to Paris via Florence, with an option for travellers to stay overnight in Tuscany.

The third will run from Geneva to Venice, stopping in Verona and passing through the famous Brenner Pass in the Alps.

The train itself (which was made famous by Agatha Christie’s ‘Murder on the Orient Express’) has also had an upgrade, with three grand new suites named after European cities on the London-Istanbul route.

The Prague suite will be done out in gold, purples and Cubist-influenced mosaics; the Vienna with golds, greens and plenty of fin de siècle ornamentation; and the Budapest will weave in Gothic and Ottoman touches, inspired by the two sides of the Hungarian capital.