Extended to Balearics tell of their frustration
it’s for safety and everything, but if people are already taking measures then I think it’s so much of a hassle.
“I’m going to be there for just two nights, barely three days, so it’s not even a long time.”
Joe Allen, a TV producer from London who returned from Madrid on Sunday, said he “absolutely wouldn’t have gone” if he had known he would need to go into quarantine on his return.
He went on: “We just have to follow the rules and we get that, but I think we’re all frustrated.”
Downing Street added that holidaymakers who miss out on work because of the quarantine period may be eligible for Universal Credit or employment support allowance but not statutory sick pay.
Earlier, the Government was urged to introduce “smarter measures” at the border.
Labour’s Shadow Home Secretary Nick Thomas-Symonds said there are “serious questions” about the blanket self-isolation requirement.
He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “The first is why we are still employing the... blunt tool of the 14-day quarantining rather than smarter measures, and secondly the chaotic nature of the decision-making which certainly hasn’t bred confidence in the Government’s approach.”
Torfaen MP Mr Thomas-Symonds added: “I think you need a smarter set of quarantine measures at the airport. I’ve suggested this test, trace and isolate regime but you can also have temperature checking and other things – you look at a range of measures.”
Andrew Flintham, managing director of TUI UK and Ireland, called for a “more nuanced policy” to include rules based on regions as well as countries.
Speaking to Sky News, he said: “We’re really after a little bit of a nuance because, being honest, going forward, with something like the United States, it could be there’s a problem in Florida but not in California, and you wouldn’t want to close the whole of the United States to tourists.”
Chris Walker, 48, a university lecturer and campus librarian from Leeds, has cancelled his holiday to France over fears of the country being removed from the Government’s quarantine-free list.
“We were not confident our annual travel insurance would cover us if we went ahead and things changed,” he said. “The sudden nature of it meant that we could not risk it.
“We didn’t want to cut short or risk a scramble back to the UK or be out of pocket due to a sudden decision by the Government.”
Close to 1.8 million holidays were likely to have been thrown into chaos by the move, according to travel company The PC Agency, which analysed the number of seats booked on flights leaving the UK for Spain between July 26 and August 31.
Meanwhile, French health authorities said at the weekend that the country’s R-rate was up to 1.3 and that daily new infections on Friday had risen to 1,130 – indicators resembling those seen in May, when France was coming out of its strict two-month lockdown.
Health minister Helen Whately said so-called air bridges to other countries are constantly “under review”.
She told Today: “What we said throughout the time when we’ve put in place the policy on the travel corridors, the air bridges, is that we would need to keep those under review, that we would need to monitor the rates in other countries.
“That is exactly what we’ve done in Spain, so we are enacting the policy that we committed to doing.
“The rate was going up very rapidly in Spain and we had to take very rapid, decisive action.”