Random Thoughts - Getting Ready to Travel Again...

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This morning, I received an email from the airline that I was booked with for my travel to a neighbouring country next month. 

The email was a kind and helpful gesture from the airline as it provides a checklist of the pre-travel actions that I need to take prior to the trip, the various documentations required and getting all paperwork in order before the trip starts. Besides serving as a checklist on the  tasks I have to complete for a smooth trip, it also serves as a reminder to me that traveling again after more than 24 months will be a vastly different experience. Things are just no longer the same as pre-COVID. 

The onerous tasks required to ensure COVID vaccinations certificates and pre-trip COVID test results are validated and submitted on time, ensuring that travel insurance covers COVID-related medical expenses up to an amount dictated by the host country, getting both hard and soft copies of all documents in order and bringing them along with me to the airport just to ensure I am allow to board the flight plus the pre-bookings and payments of on-arrival PCR tests all adds up to a rather daunting firewall to ensure that we carefully scrutinise the merits of going on a simple trip. If all these requirements are what countries consider as essential to "open up" again to the world to get their economies and ailing hospitality industries back to normal, then I personally don't think it will be much help. Sadly, this is the reality in Asia today.

Gone are the days of those free and easy "decide-search-click-book-pay" travel experiences. 😷

Masked Bears, Fullerton Hotel, Singapore (2021)


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