Canada will ease entry rules for fully vaccinated international travelers starting on Monday — a move that is being welcomed by Alberta travelers.
Rita Scalise and her family enjoyed seeing a lot of Alberta over the past two years because the pandemic upended their usual vacation routines.
But that’s about to change next week when they fly off to Puerto Vallarta.
The Calgary woman says the hassle of COVID-19 tests kept them grounded.
“It was honestly nerve-wracking,” said Scalise. “The reward didn’t outweigh the risks so we parked ourselves here for two years,”
Katie Kewley, an advisor with Vision Travel in Calgary, said she has seen a huge increase in bookings since the federal government announced changes two weeks ago.
As of Monday, travelers can use a rapid antigen test instead of a PCR test.
Rapid tests must be taken the day prior to a scheduled flight or arrival at a land border or marine port.
The rapid antigen tests are often cheaper and can provide results within minutes.
The downside is that with so many people wanting to travel, Kewley said prices have gone up while airline capacity remains reduced.
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“If I was pricing something out three months ago when we still had the advisory in place — the PCR and all those restrictions — we could get really good prices for Mexico, for example. Now when I checked last week, the prices are almost tripled. It’s ridiculous,” said Kewley.
“It’s definitely worth looking because you can still find those hidden gems for lower prices. Travel advisors are great for that, but you have to remember that because of lifting restrictions so many families can now travel,” Kewley said.
Also starting on Feb. 28, unvaccinated children under the age of 12 entering Canada with fully vaccinated parents will no longer have to avoid schools and daycare for 14 days.
Fully vaccinated travelers may also be randomly selected for a PCR test upon arrival, but they will not need to quarantine while awaiting results.
“I think continuing to prioritize testing for returning travelers, it’s like they are kind of sampling the world. I think that maintaining that kind of a program is going to be important for the medium to long-term potentially,” said Dr. Lynora Saxinger, an infectious diseases physician at the University of Alberta.
“Maintaining a program like that for a period of time with intermittent checks on what we are learning from it and whether it’s proving to have value, makes a lot of sense to me.
“If we were, for example, seeing that we were picking up with this program, high numbers of positives that were missed on rapid test screening and high numbers of positives with potential variants of interest… that would be something we would need to pay attention to,” said Saxinger about the random testing program.
More airports will also be able to receive international flights as of Feb. 28. Up until now, only 18 Canadian airports were allowed to accept these flights.
Fort McMurray, Alta., Windsor, Ont., London, Ont., and Moncton, N.B., will begin accepting international flights.
The CEO of the Fort McMurray International Airport Authority says that’s great news for airports that have struggled over the past two years, but he said the remaining testing requirements continue to be a hinderance to travel.
“We want to continue to see progress to a no-testing environment like other countries around the world have started to do,” said RJ Steenstra.
Steenstra said Denmark, the UK, Switzerland and France have removed testing obligations for fully vaccinated passengers.
“We follow the public health authority guidelines and we do want to start to continue to move in a direction where testing will be reduced to a minimum, or go away completely, simply because it continues to be a challenge for travel coming back into the country,” Steensta said.
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