Australia is open again, with the last of its pandemic-related travel restrictions removed on Monday.
Australia closed its borders entirely to tourists and nearly entirely to residents in March 2020, with some of the strictest pandemic measures in the world. While called draconian by some, those measures mean that two years into the pandemic Australia’s COVID-19 deaths remain just under 5,000. No, that number isn’t missing any zeros. For comparison, the United States had a single day in January 2021 with nearly the same number of deaths, and a total rapidly rising towards 1 million. That’s 9.5 deaths per million citizens, versus 31.6 per million.
While Australia has gradually relaxed restrictions to allow citizens, international students, and skilled migrants entry in the past few months, tourism remained off the table. No longer.
As the pandemic reaches levels that scientists consider endemic rather than critical, most countries are relaxing restrictions, and Australia is one of them. Any vaccinated traveler is welcome to land in Australia, by air or sea. On Monday, when the first unrestricted flights landed, some airports pulled out all the stops to welcome them. Sydney’s airport greeted international passengers with a kangaroo mascot, toy koalas, and – in peak Australia – Tim Tams and Vegemite.
The first flight to land in Sydney was a Quantas flight from Los Angeles, which landed at 6:20 am, carrying passengers from eight overseas destinations. Its passengers, from Vancouver, London, Singapore, New Delhi and more, were greeted personally by the Australian Federal Tourism Minister, Dan Tehan.
“I think there’ll be a very strong rebound in our tourism market. Our wonderful experiences haven’t gone away,” Tehan said. Even so, experts expect tourism to take up to two years to recover.
Vaccination status is likely to be a permanent part of travel to Australia now, as it has been for other vaccines and other countries since vaccination was invented. Travelers’ vaccination status is checked before flying.
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