You've seen the great airfare rates and are contemplating a trip to Europe, but is it possible? Is it worth the effort? Yes and Yes, but with some caveats. Here's my advice:
1) If you aren't vaxxed, forget it
2) Know before you book and know before you go
Know the restrictions and regulations of where you want to travel. These can change monthly, weekly, and even daily. We booked our trip in March 2021 for December 2021. The restrictions changed countless times, and as Omicron struck in December, they changed almost daily.
I would suggest before even booking, know the restrictions. For example, I have been looking at going to Greece for spring break. After looking at their testing requirements, even for vaxxed travelers, I have determined that it is virtually impossible to comply with their requirements and scrapped the idea of a Greek getaway.
I recommend the following places to check restrictions:
-Sherpa is great. You enter your vax status, your travel date, and travel locations and it tells you what will be required (testing, quarantining, etc.). It also provides links to the country's government websites where you can read more about the rules. Finally it provides you links to the forms you need to travel to each country (WARNING: IF YOU DON'T LIKE FORMS, STOP HERE. DO NOT PASS GO!). You can also click to see what will be required to get back home from your destination.
-US Consulate for the country you want to travel to. They will try to give you the most up to date info
-Look at the other country's government websites (again, Sherpa will provide links that takes you there)
3. If planning isn't your thing, you need to wait
If planning every single detail isn't your thing, then European travel right now isn't for you. You have to buy all of your tickets with timed entry in advance of your trip. I am a planner, so this wasn't that foreign of a concept for me, but where you used to buy a day pass for a particular museum, now you have to buy a timed pass. This can makes it more difficult because you don't always know how much time you want to spend in one place. If you don't have tickets purchased in advance of your arrival, you aren't getting in most places.
4. If you don't like masks, forget it.
Masking is required on the airplane and in the airports obviously. But consider how long that means you will have to wear that mask. Because of a delayed flight in London on our trip home, that meant we wore a mask for about 21 hours, when you factor in we had one on from the time we walked out of our hotel room to the time we walked off the shuttle bus at DFW.
You also have to wear a mask everywhere in Europe. They aren't fooling around. You can be fined for not wearing one. They may also require a high quality mask...Trains in Italy required a surgical grade or higher mask.
Note: Some places started requiring outdoor wearing again during Omicron (again check requirements).
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Now, if you have read the above rules of Kara and still want to go, here are some other helpful hints and things I did to make things easier/smoother:
1) HOTELS: I always pay for my hotels in advance. Normally when I book, I pre-pay. You can usually get a bit of a better rate, and I like to have my trip paid for before I leave so I don't have a big credit card bill arriving after I return home. This trip, I did not pay in advance and made sure to only book rooms that I was able to cancel.
2) BOOKING TICKETS: I almost always book tickets in advance. Whether its to a church, train, museum, whatever. I want to always maximize my time at a location by avoiding lines. I found that you couldn't book things as far in advance as you normally can. So I felt like this added a bit of stress for me because I was having to book so many things in the last month or so leading up to the trip. Also, if I booked an expensive tour, like the Vatican Museum tour, I made sure I could cancel and get money back (it was one I could actually book pretty far in advance). Basically, I just had to do a lot of checking periodically to see if tickets were on sale yet.
3) CDC VAX CARD: Europe uses a "Green Pass" which is a handy QR code that they scan everywhere. In the US, our CDC cards are from the stone ages. Most places will accept our CDC card. Some places want to see your passport to compare the name and info on them. For a day or two, they allowed US residents to apply online for Green Passes. Then that stopped. I'm not sure if that will get up and running again or not.
I purchased card protectors for me and my family last spring. I was really glad I had them for this trip because as many times as we had to pull the card out and then put it away, it would have taken a beating.
Also, some countries want you to "convert" to a Green Pass. France for example has a list of pharmacies you can visit and pay about 36 euros for them to convert your CDC card to a green pass. They seem to indicate you have to do this. It's easier to find the pharmacies to do this in the larger cities, but again, they have a list of where to go. I suggest that you put them on a google map before you leave and then you will have that info.
France also gives you a 72 hour Green Pass if you take a test and are negative. Since we were going to Italy and needed a test anyway, we just took a test first thing upon our arrival to Paris. This gave us the Green Pass, plus our travel test and we only had to pay once. Here's the google map I did for my trip and you can see the purple dots indicating everywhere we could test or convert our card. I got these locations from the French Government Health Ministry's website. I search by zip code to find ones close to my hotel and then put them on my map. This made things super easy when we arrived to walk right to a testing location.
4) TESTING TO GET HOME: You have to test to get back to the United States. You have options and depending on where you are traveling, testing can be much easier than what we are used to here in the US. You should be able to check with your hotel and they could give you advice. In Italy for example, you probably want to have an appointment. In France, well you can walk right into a pharmacy and get one easily.
We went with a different option. We did the Abbott BinaxNOW at home test that is run through eMed. They work just like the BinaxNOW test you may have used at home already, but you have to log on to eMed and be observed. There is lots of scanning of QR Codes to ensure that you aren't switching anything out, etc. but it is easy to do as long as you have a device and wifi. Each person testing has to have their own connection to eMed. Here we were doing our tests with me connected to the iPad and Mom to an iPhone.
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