The travel itch is boosting vacation bookings, but COVID testing remains key hurdle

Travel agencies and airlines are seeing a surge in bookings abroad as the spring break approaches, but a real spike will likely hinge on how far the federal government rolls back COVID-19 testing rules.

Bookings to sun destinations via Tripcentral.ca now top 50 per cent of pre-pandemic levels, with an uptick over the weekend as word spread of a possible wind-down of testing requirements, said president Richard Vanderlubbe.

Calls are coming in so fast he’s struggling to hire enough agents to handle them after cutting nearly 60 per cent of his

160 employees and shuttering all 26 office locations in Ontario and Atlantic Canada.

“The whole industry is finding that we’re short-staffed right now for this rise that’s come. And we’re still dealing with the cancellations that occurred before and getting people rebooked” - a particularly timeconsuming task for customers and agents alike - he said in a phone interview.

Flight Centre spokeswoman Allison Wallace predicts a sustained industry rebound as confidence in travel safety continues to build, with about 80 per cent of Canadians now double vaccinated.

“We are extremely busy as we’ve seen a significant increase in both inquiries and bookings. Last year ... there was a lot more uncertainty around restrictions and border requirements that were changing regularly,” Wallace said in an email.

“The PCR testing upon arrival is the biggest deterrent for people right now and if the government does in fact announce its removal (or even a rapid antigen test instead), we expect to see bookings increase dramatically beyond March break.”

While Flight Centre reservations for the next month remain at 40 per cent of pre-pandemic levels, departure numbers have shot up to more than eight times last year’s total, when Caribbean flights were halted.

Ottawa continues to mandate molecular testing before departure to Canada and upon arrival, even as airlines and infectious disease specialists call for an end to travel testing and countries such as Denmark, Switzerland and the United Kingdom scrap requirements for vaccinated passengers.

The Canadian Travel and Tourism Roundtable is demanding the federal government lay out a road map with clear timelines around removing pre-departure and on-arrival testing and isolation rules for inoculated passengers and their children, as well as blanket travel advisories - in place since mid-December when the Omicron variant spread widely.

“Since the pandemic’s start, only one per cent of all cases of COVID-19 in Canada have been related to travel, and throughout the last wave the test positivity rate in communities reached ten times what it was at our borders,” the roundtable said Monday in a letter to the prime minister.

Travel rules were designed to keep the virus out of the country, but community spread is now responsible for about 99 per cent of all infections, said Dr. Zain Chagla, an infectious disease physician at St. Joseph’s hospital in Hamilton and an associate professor at McMaster University, last week.

Singling out travel for COVID-19 testing “does not make any sense” since it is no riskier than other activities, he said.