Vaccinated British Tourists Welcomed to Visit Cyprus From May 1
The Cyprus Government has announced that they will open their borders for vaccinated UK tourists planning to visit the country from May 1.
AtoZSerwisPlus.com had reported in an article published in December last year that Cyprus is the first European Union Member State to announce that they will remove all entry restrictions for travellers who have been vaccinated against COVID-19.
It is yet to be seen how Cyprus will require the British tourists to prove they have taken the two vaccine doses.
Savvas Perdios, Cyprus’s tourism minister, clarified that the country would allow the entrance of UK visitors that have taken the approved vaccines by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) without having to submit a negative test or stay self-isolated, AtoZSerwisPlus.com reports.
However, the tourists need to have had the second dose of the vaccine seven days prior to entering Cyprus, the minister stressed.
Until today, only Oxford-AstraZeneca, Moderna, and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines have been approved by the EMA, SchengenVisaInfo.com reports.
BBC News reported that the vaccination certificates had not been approved yet, but Cabinet Office Minister Michael Gove will review the possible measures.
The whole process entirely relies upon factors that are directly connected to the pandemic, including the vaccine rollouts and the dominance of new variants of the virus.
The income from the tourist sector in Cyprus declined by about 85 per cent in 2020, with the country being in and out of lockdown for a year.
Amid the ongoing tourism plans, Cyprus until now has recorded 232 deaths and 36,004 infections. Therefore, the authorities require everyone to take a test once a week.
According to BBC News, currently, UK citizens are banned from travelling abroad except for essential reasons. Also, Home Secretary Priti Patel has suggested that it is “too early” to make holiday plans for the second half of the year.
The Office for National Statistics said that British tourists made more than a million trips to Cyprus in 2019, therefore being the major tourists.
Except for British tourists, Cyprus took a similar decision to allow Israeli tourists to enter the country one month before the British, more precisely from April 1.
Similarly, Spain has also considered creating a clean path for all the United Kingdom citizens who have been vaccinated against the Coronavirus. The Tourism Minister of Spain has asserted that the country is working to create a mutual agreement with Spain to enable travelling for the summer season.
The idea of vaccine certificates has spread throughout the whole of Europe in recent months, and several countries have already started to remove restrictions for travellers holding such certificate.
The possibility of such a thing to happen had been warned by AtoZSerwisPlus.com in April last year after an EU official told the same that once the vaccines start to roll out in the European countries, they would become mandatory in order to enable safe travelling throughout the continent.
