Date Published: 22/10/2020
ARCHIVED - Germany and the UK create safe travel corridors to the Canary Islands
ARCHIVED ARTICLE The level of covid cases has dropped sufficiently for the Canaries to once again be considered a safe destination
The Foreign office has removed the travel warning for the Canary Islands, so travel insurance to the islands is now valid.
The Foreign office says: "the requirement to self-isolate on return to the UK from the Canary Islands will be lifted for those arriving on or after 4am on 25th October; you must still self-isolate if returning to the UK from any other part of Spain."
Good news came in a double measure on Thursday for the Canary Islands, as first Germany and then the UK removed the islands from their lists of exclusion zones, removing the need to quarantine when returning from the islands.
The German ambassador to Spain, Wolfgang Dold, made his announcement at noon to the Canarian president, Ángel Victor Torres, who expressed his delight at the news.
Almost immediately, the Canarian government announced the immediate programming of 70 flights with 13,000 seats by German tour operators. Tui has seven weekly flights to the airports of Tenerife, Gran Canaria, Fuerteventura and Lanzarote already scheduled. Germans will be able to travel to the archipelago from October 24th .
Since October 9th, the Canary Islands and the Balearic Islands have implemented a protocol that allows the opening of tourist corridors by including a covid testing system at origin and destination that guarantees safe trips for tourists visiting the two archipelagos and have worked hard to reduce the incidence of covid in the islands. The Canary Islands now has the lowest incidence of any region in Spain.
And the good news kept on coming when UK Transport Minister, Grant Shapps, confirmed that the Canary Islands had been included in the list of safe corridors and that British tourists would be able to travel to the islands from Sunday, October 25th without the need for a two week quarantine on return.
Shapps explains, through his official Twitter account, that after evaluating the most recent data on the incidence of the coronavirus, the destinations of the Canary Islands, Maldives, Denmark and Mykonos have been added to the #TravelCorridors list.
This news comes after the Exceltur tourism body estimated that the tourism industry will close the year with losses of 106,000 million euros, 7,500 million more than had originally been forecast this summer.
Although it is too early to determine whether these two travel corridors will save the winter season, it is certainly important news for tourism in Spain and is certainly very welcome at a time when there has been very little positive news for the sector since February.
Last year, the Canary Islands was the third most important tourism region in Spain, welcoming 13.1 million international visitors. Of these, about 33% are British tourists, according to data from the survey of tourist movements at borders (Frontur) published by the National Institute of Statistics (INE). Last year each English tourist spent an average of 995 euros during their visit.