That Was The Week That Was 03-07 May 2021
The European Digital Green Certificate Holiday Vaccination Passport
Safe to say, there are few people now not thinking about holidays. In Europe, the weather is (finally) heating up, the days getting longer. Of course we are thinking about holidays. But nonetheless, this week, the week that was, we still managed to make holidays a semantic jungle. First, came the Commission shooting itself in the foot on Monday by calling holidays ‘non-essential travel’. Really? I can think of nothing more essential at the moment than a holiday. More importantly, this non-essential travel is open only to those that are vaccinated. After months of being told that any certification cannot discriminate, the first time the certificate is of interest, it is only for the vaccinated, making as much like a passport as one might imagine, in that to pass through the port of arrival, one will need it.
It was no surprise that on Tuesday IATA’s new DG Willie Walsh welcomed this development, whilst also noting that the costs of testing are a concern. But, much more importantly, that most Astroturf of all organisations, Europeans four Fair Competition – the public face of Lufthansa and Air France/KLM’s attempt to stymie competition put out its Manifesto. A manifesto! Is there a heart that does not beat quicker at the very thought of a manifesto. That is much more important sounding than a policy, or in this case, a naked attempt to distort the market… sorry, ensure ‘fair competition’. If this was any more transparent it would need to have been etched on glass. Like the certificate: passport interface, fair is a word that means whatever it is you think it should mean.
By now, the world was thinking purely of the essential nature of non-essential travel. The G20 Tourism Working Group, meeting in Rome (after a fashion) on Wednesday endorsed the OECD Guidelines for the future of tourism which you may be shocked, shocked to learn that IATA welcomed. Well, it would, wouldn’t it? But it did so in that most IATA of ways, with a press release that included a quote from Walsh of 10 sentences. Two paragraphs. The Comms team seems to think that the newsroom still has sub-editors and time. Bless. No place for the grab, no place for the pithy sentence that will get attention. Ask yourself, did you notice?
Thursday was also interesting on the ‘We’re all going on a summer holiday’ front, as we recondition the old double decker bus, gather the Shadows and head out of or to Europe as the case may be. The Commission announced an expanded list of countries to which and from which we could have a holiday, sorry, no, execute non-essential travel. The list is Australia, Israel, New Zealand, Rwanda, Singapore, South Korea and Thailand. Israel is the addition there.
Brexit is a thing, and no more so than in the area of non-essential travel, because on Friday the UK announced its list of non-essential travel destinations. Not content to have Australia, Israel, New Zealand and Singapore on the list, the UK one-upped Europe by adding Brunei, Iceland, the Faro Islands, Gibraltar and in a master stroke, the Falkland Islands, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, and Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha to their list. The Commission must be green with envy. To be fair, visiting some of them would make for an interesting travelogue, including as chapter one, working out where they are and how the hell to get there. But writing a book about that holiday would disqualify it from the non-essential category. To be fair to IATA, this time the response was short and sweet. The list, Walsh commented, ‘was not worth commenting on’.