Travel news latest: Greece and Spain will remain ‘amber’ for summer, warns travel chief

Professor Adam Finn, of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), said people should not be concerned about receiving doses of AstraZeneca vaccine manufactured in India.

“The most important part of this is that people who have received these batches should be reassured that they have received exactly the same stuff as people who have received other batches made elsewhere,” he told the Today programme.

“This is an administrative hurdle that needs to be straightened out but people should not be concerned that they are in some way less well protected. We’re in the early days of this new world of needed vaccine passports and there are lots of aspects of this that are still being sorted out for the first time.

“But it’s clearly, ultimately not in anyone’s interest, including the European Union, to create hurdles that don’t need to be there.”

He added: “I would anticipate that this will get straightened out in due course.”

Read more: European holidays could be off limits to 5m Britons given Indian-made AstraZeneca jab

Budget airline Ryanair has carried 5.3 million passengers across 38,000 flights during June 2021 – a dramatic rise from its 400,000 travellers in June last year.

The operator has seen a steady increase in passengers throughout the year before numbers soared last month. April saw 1 million people fly with Ryanair, and 1.8 milion in May.

It comes a day after Jet2 restarted holidays to green-listed destinations.

Australiahas announced a dramatic cut in the number of people who will be allowed to enter the country on Friday, as it struggles to contain coronavirus clusters that plunged major cities into lockdown.

With almost half of the nation’s population under stay-at-home orders, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said quotas for overseas arrivals would be cut by around 50 per cent to help prevent further outbreaks.

Under the current “zero Covid” strategy, just 6,000 people are allowed to enter Australia on overseas commercial flights each week and arrivals must undergo mandatory two weeks hotel quarantine.

That quota will be cut to around 3,000 by the middle of July, Mr Morrison indicated, although the government will at the same time step up its private repatriation flights.

Up to five million Britons face being locked out of European holidays because their vaccines are not recognised by the EU’s passport scheme, The Telegraph has learned.

Millions of vaccines administered here do not qualify for the European Union’s vaccine passport scheme, because the shots were manufactured in India and are not yet authorised by the European Medicines Agency (EMA). The hitch could leave thousands of Britons turned away at EU border crossings when the batch numbers on their vaccines are checked digitally.

The EU Digital Covid Certificate, which launched on Thursday, is designed to allow Covid-secure travel across the continent but does not recognise a version of the AstraZeneca vaccine called Covishield, produced by the Serum Institute of India (SII), because it is yet to receive approval in Europe.

Up to five million doses of this version of the vaccine have been administered in the UK and are identifiable by the vaccine batch numbers (4120Z001, 4120Z002, 4120Z003) included on recipients’ vaccine cards and in the Covid travel pass available via the NHS app.

Read the full story here.

Boris Johnson is set to challenge Angela Merkel over why she pushed for tougher restrictions on vaccinated British travellers when they hold talks at Chequers on Friday.

The Prime Minister and the German chancellor are expected to discuss travel rules during the pandemic when they meet at Mr Johnson’s official country residence.

Mrs Merkel recently called on the European Union to adopt a single policy of making Britons quarantine even when double-jabbed to protect against the Indian or delta variant of Covid.

But Mr Johnson declared on Thursday that getting two doses of a Covid vaccine would be the “liberator” for travel, repeating that rules for quarantining when arriving in the UK would be loosened later in the summer.

Read the full story from Ben Riley-Smith here.

Among all the talk of what’s going green, spare a thought for countries that might make the jump from red to amber.

Could Turkey, Dubai or the Seychelles make the amber list in the next update? The next update is due on July 19.

My colleague, Greg Dickinson, takes a look at the ten most popular holiday destinations on the red list to assess which (if any) could move to the amber list this month.

Read about his findings here.

More than 20 countries including France, Italy and Austria are on track to join the UK’s green list and open to British holidaymakers this month, data has revealed, reports Charles Hymas.

The 22 nations – primarily in Europe – all meet the threshold for inclusion on the quarantine-free green list, according to the analysis. All have infection rates below 20 cases per 100,000 of the population, fewer than 1.5 per cent of tests with a positive Covid result, high vaccination and testing rates and low prevalence of variants.

At present there are 27 destinations – largely islands – on the green list of which Ibiza, Mallorca, Menorca, Malta and Madeira are the most popular holiday spots. Most of the rest are remote islands, many of which are closed to foreign travellers.

By analysing the data behind their inclusion, 22 more emerged as having better or similar figures in all the categories.

Read the full story here.

Happy Friday. Here’s a reminder of yesterday’s top stories:

• First groups of foreign tourists arrive in Phuket
• Delta variant dampens tourism hopes in southern Europe
• Scorching temperatures hit Greece
• Jet2 restarts holidays to green-listed destinations
• UK travellers facing another ‘lost summer’
• Survey shows quarantine risk deterring two thirds of Britons travel

 Follow us here today for the latest news as it happens.