'There is no mass exodus from amber-list Portugal – my plane wasn't even full'
Last October, we were in Cyprus when it was announced that the island was going to be removed from the green list. Cue panic, desperate half-term holidaymakers cramming themselves onto every available flight, and chaos at the airports. People spent ￡800 on flights that would normally have cost a tenth of that sum.
I expected a similar state of emergency in Lisbon, now it’s been announced that Portugal is to join the rest of Europe on the amber list on Tuesday. But far from being oversubscribed, our Friday afternoon flight out of Lisbon to Luton wasn’t even full. The Easyjet cabin-crew member I asked confirmed my own view: ‘I was expecting people to be selling their seats on flights, but they just aren’t that bothered’, she said.
Families who are here for some much-needed seaside fun in half term will anyway have bought their flights back this weekend, before school starts on Monday. So they’re swerving quarantine. I guess couples and solo travellers not tied to the school calendar will have weighed up the attractions of finishing their holiday in peace and enduring the quarantine when they get back, and decided that a few more days eating calamari under a jacaranda tree are worth the pain of working from home for another week.
That’s not to say that flying back from Portugal is stress free. Far from it. The passenger locator forms, and compulsory fit-to-fly tests are, predictably, a nightmare to navigate. We elected to do our second of three Covid tests at Lisbon airport on the day we flew, and booked appointments for three hours before the flight took off. This would have been fine if my test hadn’t come back minus a result, so I had to rush back to the test centre to make sure (even after being double jabbed) I was indeed Covid-free.
The somewhat harassed staff of the TAP test centre (Portugal’s national airline) printed out my negative test result but put my husband’s date of birth on the form. It was sheer luck that I noticed – I am not, sadly, the sort of person methodically to check such things. I have heard of people being turned away at Heathrow for that kind of glitch, so I raced back and got it printed out a second time with the right date of birth, only to get a frantic call from my husband with the news that our 14-year-old daughter’s form also had the wrong date of birth on it. Back I went to the test centre, sweating cobs, for another printout.
Meanwhile, the check-in queue, though not very long, was astonishingly slow with ground staff checking our Covid tests, our passenger locator forms, and the proof that we’ve bought a second UK Covid test to take two days after we get home.
I feel for the staff negotiating these Soviet levels of bureaucracy. A man talking to the Easyjet crew member at the next-door check-in had bought the second-day tests to take in London but the reference number he had didn’t match the space available for it on the passenger locator form. Computer said no. ‘This is ridiculous!’ He eventually yelled, at the end of his tether. ‘Let’s get the man upstairs down here where we can talk to him about it. All I’m asking for is a little common sense.’
I tried to locate the beleaguered traveller myself before the flight took off, but there was no sign of him. Evidently this time common sense didn’t prevail.