News

Booking Late

16th Sep 2020

Colchicum stevenii © Basak Gardner

With all the understandable uncertainties that the governments travel corridors brings its not easy to think of booking tours in advance and it may be like this for a while. We’ve thought long and hard on how best to travel safely within these restrictions. Indeed we’ve been doing some research of our own by travelling ourselves a bit in the last month and a half.

With Covid-19 infections rising in many areas the travel corridors open have rather reduced in recent weeks and for all there must be concern about booking a holiday and then finding that either the corridor is closed just before departing or indeed closes during a tour. Portugal, Spain and France have seen travel restrictions reimposed recently. Whilst it is impossible to completely forward guess travel corridor opening and closings booking a holiday at the last minute gives you a strong chance of ensuring that nothing changes during those weeks. We have two close to home suggestions this autumn – a number of our longer haul trips may also operate from late October. The following trips have a strong chance of being able to operate and if the travel corridors are open (and not looking close to closing!) two weeks prior to the tour why not join us!?

Peloponnese 20th – 27th October

Autumn Bulbs of Southwestern Turkey 25th October – 1st November

Please note that we operate our tours according to both the Coronavirus ‘safer travel guidance for passengers advice’ of the UK government and the World Health Organisation’s advice on ‘Protecting yourself and others from the spread of COVID-19’. Please see http://www.greentours.co.uk/News/coronavirus-update/ for more details.

We’ve personally travelled to the UK and back to Turkey in the past few weeks and our experience suggests that travelling from/to the larger airports seems much safer. They are operating in huge airy buildings that have a large passenger capacity and currently there are very few travellers passing through them so Social Distancing rules are easy to adhere to. Smaller airports rarely have the capacity to deal with more than one or two tourist flights at a time and necessarily their ability to give you room to maintain the Social Distancing rules is much lower.

So our suggestion for anyone travelling at the moment is rather than go for the small local airport go for airports like Heathrow or Manchester. Dalaman Airport in Turkey is good as it’s a new terminal designed with a huge inflow of tourist flights in mind.

And those autumn bulbs have already started flowering and the birds are already migrating through, but more on that in a couple of days!