The European Union is seeking to smooth travel between member nations by relying on a person’s vaccine or infection status rather than an individual country or region.
The EU’s 27 Europe ministers have agreed new guidelines so citizens can avoid travel issues when foreign planning trips.
European Commission vice president Maros Sefcovic said: ”We should move to the person-based approach. It means that how you as a person are protected against the possible infection and not to work on the country by country or regional basis.”
The EU said it can adopt the new approach because of a high vaccine uptake across the bloc and easy use of a QR code app. Some 70 per cent of adults are fully-vaccinated.
Under the new process, travel certification would be valid for nine months since the last dose or after a booster jab. A negative PCR test no more than three days old or an antigen test one day old also counts, as does a recovery certificate no more than six months old.
The changes aim to avoid individual nations bringing in their own regulations.
French Europe minister Clement Beaune added: "You are right to say that when a new variant appears and when the pandemic hits at speed, suddenly there are tensions that often lead to fragmentation.
“But if you look at what happened at the beginning of the Omicron variant, it was only a minority of the states who introduced additional measures.”
Travel to areas with very high infection rates would still be discouraged, under the new guidelines that will be adopted from Tuesday.
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