What are my prospects for a trip to Dubai in late May?
Q I need to travel to Dubai for an event in the third week in May. However, I have children and can’t quarantine in a hotel for 10 days on return, as the current “red list status” demands.
Do you have any inside information about Dubai being downgraded to amber or green? Or is there someone I can contact to put the case that this is an urgent work trip that I should be able to make without quarantining in a hotel?
Name supplied
A To answer your final point first: there is no one in government who is interested in providing a no-hotelquarantine guarantee, however important the trip. But I am still optimistic you can travel to Dubai and back without hotel quarantine in late May.
The United Arab Emirates was placed on the UK’s red list on 12 January. At the time, the transport secretary, Grant Shapps, said “the latest data” required anyone arriving from the UAE – which includes the key hubs of Dubai and Abu Dhabi – to self-isolate.
Three months on, much of the adult population in the UAE has been vaccinated. Deaths from Covid-19 are averaging three per day. In contrast, France has given a first jab to just 16 per cent of its people. It is averaging 30,000 new Covid cases per day and, sadly, 300 daily deaths (corresponding to 43 per day in a country with the population of the UAE).
Yet while France remains on the “amber” list, requiring 10 days of self-isolation at home, the UAE is stuck on “red“– which means 11 nights of hotel quarantine at a cost of £1,750 per person.
In your position, though, I would be confident that the pretence that the UAE presents more of a threat to the UK than France will end in early May.
That is when the government says it will assign countries into red, amber and green categories, ahead of the relaunch of international leisure travel on 17 May; work trips are allowed at any time.
Unless some dramatic event takes place, there seems no grounds for keeping the UAE as red – and some analysts argue that it should move straight to green, requiring just a couple of tests and no self-isolation.
The big UAE airlines seem to agree. At present neither Emirates of Dubai nor Etihad of Abu Dhabi is allowed to sell tickets from the UAE to the UK (though their planes still fly in daily to carry cargo and pick people up). But they are already selling inbound to the UK from 18 May and 16 May respectively.
A return Emirates flight from London Heathrow to Dubai, going out on 13 May and back a week later, looks good value at under £400 return. If my prediction turns out to be wrong, while you won’t get a refund you can change dates, rebook or extend ticket validity for two years.