Originally Posted by
GogglesPisano
Now if only Europe would get their act together.
I predict restriction-free travel between the US, Israel, and the the UK by summer (to join Iceland.)
Indeed. I just spent some time living in Europe, and it was ridiculous and maddening. I could walk up to a testing site with nothing more than a passport, a phone number, and a notional address and get an antigen test and a text to my phone with the results in less than 30 minutes for free (PCR test took a little longer and would cost you €70). Heaven forbid you get stopped between your apartment and the grocery store at a random police checkpoint and you don’t have negative test results within the last 7 days to show the cops (€2000 fine). In the meantime, not a few countries are under significant political stress because their vaccination plans are perfunctory at best, have all kinds of elite nepotism problems (the same elites that have exempted themselves from travel/movement restrictions, or the financial pain of lockdowns). In the meantime, flying within Europe means PCR within 72 hours, plus an antigen test within 24 hours of departure, and proof of reservations to stay somewhere before they let you social distance through a glacially paced check in and security line, before shoehorning you into an airplane at max capacity. [Separate rant: The Delta JV airline has ZERO distinguishing features between the basic cabin seat accommodations and the business class cabin. Exact same seats, no change in pitch or spacing. The curtain to separate the cabins is transparently on a moveable track and can be slid forward or back to show who got suckered into paying a lot more for the same service. They boarded 100% back to front on the airplane, so paying extra to be towards the front meant full overhead bin space before you got on board. If I had paid good money to fly Delta and then connect onto the JV airline, I’d be ticked to no end for the dramatic drop off in space and service for a much more expensive ticket. Mind you, this is a JV that has no issues flying the newest and largest WB airplanes in and out of our hubs, while flying Delta coded tickets. Top end scope is 100% about protecting the brand and delivering a better product to our customers. Even with our reduced cabin service, our NB product is an order of magnitude better than our JV outsourcing in Europe. Thread drifting rant over]
Speaking of Iceland, my wife and I are 100% doing the rented camper van to skinny dip in hot springs tour during the NQAT training mess that our company has inflicted upon itself.