UK inclusion of Madeira on green list ‘prompted surge in bookings’
On June 24 the UK government announced that the archipelago of Madeira, along with Spain's Balearic Islands and some nations in the Caribbean had been added to its green list.
The inclusion of Madeira on the UK travel ‘green list’ has prompted an “immediate” response from potential tourists, with the booking of some 65,000 places in July and August, the Portuguese region’s secretary for tourism has told Lusa.
“It was an immediate, energetic reaction of a great volume of reservations,” Eduardo Jesus told Lusa.
After the UK moved Portugal from its green list to its amber list, Madeiran officials said that they made representations to the UK authorities and tour operators, citing the more favourable epidemiological situation in the region and seeking what they called “positive discrimination” towards the region.
On June 24 the UK government in London announced that the archipelago of Madeira, along with Spain’s Balearic Islands and some nations in the Caribbean, including Barbados, had been added to its green list – which exempts returning holidaymakers from having to quarantine on arrival back in the UK.
The changes, which also included several UK overseas territories, come into effect on Wednesday.
Jesus said that immediately after that announcement “there was an operator that is significant to Madeira that mentioned that in a single day they registered the same amount of bookings that they would normally have in a week.
“So the market is eager for this possibility to travel to Madeira and needs security,” he added.
The archipelago of Madeira has one island, Porto Santo, that is considered to be ‘Covid free’ and the region as a whole currently has around 60 active cases.
“This safety that we have in the region was finally communicated to British decision-makers so that justice was done and Madeira was placed where it should be, which is in the green corridor,” Jesus said, adding that that “with this regained trust, the reservations automatically appear.”
As well as an estimated 65,000 travellers already booked on flights to the region, he said, other passengers are “arriving after stopovers at Lisbon and Porto airports.”
In terms of direct flights from the UK, an estimated 28,000 people are expected in July and 37,000 in August.
“Let’s see if there is no further impediment here that will constrain this trajectory” of tourism recovery expected for the summer, he stressed, adding that the regional government would do all it could to try to reverse last week’s decision by Germany’s government to put Portugal on its list of ‘virus-variant areas’ with Madeira not treated any differently despite the fact that no cases of the Delta variant initially detected in India have yet been recorded in the region.
The decision by Germany has prompted a wave of cancellations by tourists from that country, at a time when the region had an estimated 6,200 seats available on direct flights that will be lost over the next 14 days, according to Jesus.
According to the latest data released Saturday regarding the epidemiological situation in the archipelago by the regional health directorate, Madeira had seven new cases of infection by SARS-CoV-2 in the 24 hours to midnight on Sunday. With 11 more patients deemed recovered from the disease, there were 61 active cases.
There were no more deaths to add to the total of 72, which has been unchanged since 25 May. There are currently four patients with Covid-19 at Funchal hospital, none in intensive care.
In Portugal as a whole, 17,083 people have died of Covid-19 out of 873,051 confirmed cases of infection, according to the latest bulletin from the Directorate-General of Health.
Worldwide, the Covid-19 pandemic has claimed more than 3.9 million lives, resulting from nearly 180 million cases of infection.
The respiratory disease is caused by the new SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, detected in late 2019 in Wuhan, a city in central China.
