The opening, after 19 months, will be an important relief for this sector on the eve of the Christmas holidays and in the middle of the high season.
The United States lifted restrictions on tourist travel at airports and land borders on Monday, a measure that has been in force for 19 months for “non-essential travel” and which on this first day of opening has returned airports to their usual bustle, without that up to now there have been any significant delays or incidents.
Since this Monday, tourists they can enter the country with a proof of vaccination plus a negative PCR test, a measure that equates it to the one that most countries apply to their visitors and that has been demanded by the tourism sector.
American Airlines, the largest airline in the United States and the world, had planned more than 150 international flights for this day alone, twenty of them transatlantic, and the rest of the month it will operate more than 200 daily flights on as many routes, to increase to 300 daily at the beginning of 2022, according to company figures.
As an example, the flights of American and its partners in the One World Alliance (which includes Iberia and British Airways) They have tripled from Spain this week and have increased sixfold from the UK.
The arrivals terminals of the main airport in New York, the John F. Kennedy (JFK), returned to bustle this Monday with the arrival of a good number of travelers, tourism or for a family reunion, he refers EFE.
“Finally, we have been waiting for months and months,” says Sarab Alasadi, a dentist from Paris who has arrived at Terminal 1 in New York on one of the first flights available from her country and who had not seen her for more than two years. sister.
Despite the volume of travelers, Alasadi says that he has not suffered major delays upon arrival in New York, where he has not been required to show proof of vaccination: “Everything has been requested of me upon departure from Paris, not upon arrival. Everything has been very fast here, ”says the Parisian.
To enter the country, only vaccines approved by the United States FDA agency or the World Health Organization (WHO) will be accepted. For now, this includes those from AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, Moderna, Pfizer / BioNTech, Indian Covaxin, and China’s Sinopharm and Sinovac.
But for many travelers from Latin America and the Caribbean this is a problem, or because they have not yet been able to get vaccinated in their countries due to a lack of doses, or because they were not vaccinated with any of these immunizers.
For example, vaccines such as the Russian Sputnik V and the Chinese CanSino still do not have a green light from the FDA or the WHO, but they were applied, for example, in Argentina and Mexico.
Reactivation of a vital sector
According to the Travel Association of the United States, the closure of the borders by the coronavirus has meant the loss of 300,000 million of income countable as exports, in addition to causing the loss of more than a million jobs associated with the travel sector and sightseeing.
The United States is the third most visited country in the world in number of travelers (76 million in 2019, behind France and Spain), but it is the first in terms of foreign exchange earnings from tourism, with 214,000 million in 2019, with a great difference over the following, according to figures from the World Tourism Organization.
The US air closure affected 33 countries – including the 26 of the Schengen area and such lucrative markets as China, India and Brazil – which represent only 17% of countries in the world, but represent 53% of all visitors received by States. United.
In addition, the opening of the land border with the two neighbors to the north (Canada) and the south (Mexico), the two main tourist markets for the United States, will be an important relief for this sector on the eve of the Christmas holidays, in full high season.
The United States closed the borders for travelers from China since February 2020. It then extended the ban to visitors from Iran, the 26 European countries in the Schengen area, as well as the United Kingdom, Ireland, Brazil, South Africa and India.
And in March 2020 it limited entry by land or ferry from its neighbors Mexico and Canada.
On Monday, in the Mexican city of Tijuana, many travelers on foot and by car waited before dawn for the San Ysidro border post in California to reopen for “non-essential” travelers. refers AFP.
One of them was the Mexican Isabel González, who will now be able to hug her children living in the United States after 18 months separated by the pandemic. “I’m very happy,” said the 63-year-old woman, making the crossing on foot, minutes before midnight on Sunday.
The waits to cross were repeated on the other side of the country, on the Thousand Islands International Bridge, which connects southeastern Ontario, in Canada, with northern New York, in the United States.
Along the US-Mexico border, many cities struggled financially due to restrictions imposed by COVID-19.
In anticipation of the reopening, the currency exchange centers of Mexico’s Ciudad Juárez, on the border with El Paso, Texas, were affected by the shortage of dollars. (I)
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