The Foreign Office has warned British residents against all but essential
travel to Italy after coronavirus quarantine measures were extended throughout the country.
It said in a statement: “We have amended our travel advice to recommend against all but essential travel to Italy. The safety of British nationals is always our number one priority.
“The advice is that anyone who arrives from Italy subsequent to the Italian government decision should now self-isolate for 14 days.”
Italy had initially imposed a quarantine on Sunday on northern regions that are home to 16 million people, where the outbreak began. On Monday evening the PM extended those restrictions on travel and public gatherings to the whole country.
Hundreds of British tourists were scrambling to get home from the north of the country on Monday – a situation that is expected to worsen now that the whole country is locked down.
Despite travel restrictions for Italians, planes continued to fly passengers between the country’s locked-down region and the UK.
The Foreign Office (FCO) is under pressure from the public and the travel industry to change its advice on Italy from advising against “all but essential” travel – creating ambiguity around whether insurers would pay out on cancelled trips – to bringing in a total ban.
During a press conference on Monday, Sir Patrick Vallance, the chief scientific adviser, defended a lack of screening for those newly arrived in Britain from northern Italy, saying that “temperature screening in an airport doesn’t really have much effect”.
At Manchester airport, posters instructed new arrivals to self-isolate if they flew in from the locked-down region, but there were no checks, said Seana Corr, 27, from Wirral, after disembarking from a flight from Milan.
Corr described Milan as a place where “everything has been cancelled”, adding: “There are no social gatherings any more. It’s all closed down … The streets are empty, people are out of work, the shops are empty because people have started stockpiling. Bars and restaurants are closed. There are no guards on the streets and children are playing out in the streets because they are not in school.”
Tour operators Inghams and Crystal Ski both said they were working to bring all their customers home from ski resorts in northern Italy, where authorities announced that ski lifts had either been closed or were due to shut on Tuesday.
The planned airlift involves a combination of charter flights and scheduled flights, and came as British Airways, Ryanair and easyJet cut the number of flights they operate to and from northern Italy after the lockdown of selected northern provinces.
Inghams – which brought back hotel guests from the locked-down “red zone” of Lombardy on Sunday – said more than 600 customers would be brought home over the next 48 hours. They include guests from areas that had not been locked down, such as in the Aosta Valley ski region, where lifts closed on Sunday. Inghams was also contacting guests in the Dolomites ahead of lift closures on Tuesday.
Angela Hall from Portsmouth, a customer of Crystal Ski, arrived in the Dolomites on Sunday, hours before she heard that authorities would be closing ski lifts.
“I had seen on the news before we departed that there was a lockdown in a different region and called Crystal before leaving the UK but they said everything was fine,” she told the Guardian from an airport-bound coach with others on Monday.
While she was critical of Crystal Ski for not being as informative as she would have liked, other customers were much angrier at the company, which is owned by TUI.
One group said two couples in their number had been contacted on Friday by Inghams to say the company had drawn on Public Health England advice to decide it was no longer safe to bring them to the resort of Selva and would be issuing full refunds.
But Meg Evans, who was in the group, said there had been no communication from Crystal Ski and it eventually responded to say it was still awaiting formal guidance from the Foreign Office, even when the couples pointed out that the hotel they were due to stay in had been the subject of a outbreak of coronavirus among a dozen guests.
“We’re really quite angry at how it was handled. Three of our group are GPs and couldn’t possibly risk being out of action at a time when the NHS would need them later on at home,” she said, adding that some of the couples had now paid for a second holiday this week in France.
Crystal Ski said it was planning to to get customers back to the UK as soon as possible after restrictions were put in place by local authorities in a number of ski resorts. Refunds would be given for the days of holidays missed out on.
The British embassy in Rome, meanwhile, was the focus of sustained lobbying on social media by British people asking the FCO to alter its travel advice on Italy to specifically warn against all travel to certain regions, rather than currently advising against “all but essential travel” to a number of selected locked-down areas.
Some commenters complained that insurers and airlines were holding off on responding or paying out for cancelled school trips and other visits.
Carolyn Spinks, CEO of the UK tour operators to Italy (ABTOI) industry body, said that tour operators felt it would be “helpful if the FCO put its money where its mouth was” by simply warning against all travel to areas affected by coronavirus without any caveats.
