Families’ fury as Brits fleeing Portugal forced to pay £1k to beat quarantine only for Gov to keep it OFF isolation list
FAMILIES were left fuming as they paid £1,000 to flee Portugal in order to beat a potential quarantine, only for the Government to keep the country OFF the isolation list.
John Cushing, a single dad from Bristol, had to cut his holiday in Portugal short to beat the quarantine that never happened, so that his daughter Georgie, 12, could go back to school.
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He had to stump up £1,000 for flights on Thursday – which is triple the cost of the return flights he had already paid for.
Mr Cushing said: “My daughter was in tears yesterday at the thought of not being able to go back to school and see her friends.
“She has already missed most of year seven [at school] and I can’t let her miss the first two weeks of year eight.”
He had waited six months to visit his villa in the Algarve, and as soon as the Government gave Portugal the all-clear, he booked the flights.
Mr Cushing paid £320 for return flights from Bristol for himself and 12-year-old daughter Georgie, arriving last week.
However, after hearing rumours that Portugal might be put back on the UK’s quarantine list, he knew he had to get his family back home.
He told the BBC: “The airlines have us over a barrel and don’t seem to have any sympathy.”
John Cushing and his family aren’t the only ones who are furious about the situation, as other Brits in Portugal were forced to change their holiday plans last minute.
Jodie Hudson-Cox, from Essex, was originally going to fly back to Southend from the Algarve on Saturday – but changed her flights to avoid the potential quarantine.
She said: “I re-booked early this week for flights coming back into East Midlands airport on Friday.
PORTU-NO!
“We booked the flights so we weren’t sat here worrying about it all week.”
Meanwhile, a Welsh dad-of-two whose family will have to quarantine for 14 days after his Greece holiday has slammed the inconsistency between Westminster and Cardiff.
Jonathan Lake was left seething after Wales added Greece and Portugal to its red list last night – and says he may book a Premier Inn in Bristol to avoid isolating.
Furious Mr Lake, from Cardiff, who is staying with his wife and two children near Chania, Crete, branded the situation an “absolute joke”.
He said: “It’s the lack of consistent messaging and management across the whole UK Government I’m really angry about now.
“And the fact they’ve announced it at five o’clock UK time, so 7pm they’ve said ‘you’ve got until 4am tomorrow to get home’.
“I mean, what, am I supposed to charter a private jet to try and get me and my family home?”
Mr Lake and his family are scheduled to fly back to London Gatwick on Tuesday with Tui.
He said: “I’m almost at the point where I’m thinking I’m just going to book a Premier Inn or something in Bristol – if it costs me five or six hundred pounds I don’t really care.
“I can afford it, I’ll do it – and stay there and I’ll just live my life as normal.
“Because if there’s 196 people on that flight from England they can just go and live their life as normal, but because I live in Wales, Vaughan Gething has said “screw you, I’m going to make you sit in your house for 14 days”.
“It’s a joke, an absolute joke.”
English mum Kelly Jones has accused the Government of “moving the goalposts left, right and centre” after Portugal remained on the exempt list.
Ms Jones, from Birmingham, said she paid Jet2 £900 to move her flights home from Faro from Saturday to Friday – in anticipation of quarantine measures being reintroduced.
She wanted to ensure her three children wouldn’t miss out on two weeks of school if they were caught in the quarantine.
But despite widespread speculation that Portugal and Greece would be removed from the list of exempt countries because of rising case numbers,
Mrs Jones, 45, called the situation was “absolutely disgusting” saying: “It’s cost us a lot more money and it’s money we didn’t need to spend now.
“We’ve lost an extra night in our villa – we won’t get that back – we’ve got a hire car, so we’re taking that back a day early.
“It’s the knock-on effects as well.”
Mrs Jones said she and her husband took the decision to change their flights after monitoring the seven-day infection rate for Portugal, which reached 23 per 100,000 on Wednesday – above the Government’s stated quarantine threshold of 20.
She said: “The Government just change the goalposts left, right and centre at the moment. It’s embarrassing.
“They don’t make things clear enough.
“They say they need the rate under 20 and it’s gone above that this week, so why wouldn’t you think it would go on the quarantine list tonight?
“You can guarantee if I hadn’t have booked those flights on Monday, that air bridge would have been removed tonight.”
Mrs Jones said she could not risk having to quarantine as her youngest child, who is four, is starting school for the first time next week, while her other two children, 11 and seven, are starting new schools.
“There’s no way it would be fair on them two weeks later to go in when everyone else has already started to settle,” she said.
In previous weeks, the Government has announced changes to its exemption list on Thursday with changes coming into force at 4am on Saturday, leading to a scramble for passengers to return in time to avoid having to quarantine.
Mrs Jones believes it would be fairer on holidaymakers if they were given more time to change their plans.
“It’s always lastminute.com with the Government,” she said.
“They do the announcement on a Thursday night and then you’ve got til 4 o’clock on a Saturday morning to get home, which they know you can’t do.
“They don’t give you enough time to do anything. They could have said at the start of the week ‘the numbers are going up but we’re going to sit on it for another seven to 10 days’ but they don’t do that.
“It’s like, ‘we make the decision at five o’clock on a Thursday night and that’s it: bang, get home’. That’s where it’s wrong.”
Tennis player Emma Coe, 15, said: “If I went back to England, I would be missing two weeks of tennis training.
“I go to this full-time tennis academy at Dukes Meadows and I’ll be missing a lot of training.
“My dad had to go home, as well as my three brothers.
“My dad had to cut his holiday short, from a week to four or five days.”
TRAVEL FURY
She said her father would be feeling “pretty annoyed” that he cut his holiday short in anticipation the government would put Portugal on the quarantine list.
He had to pay extra for flights home for himself and his two sons.
Emma said: “My two other brothers would be annoyed. Very frustrating.”
Holidaymaker Derek Lowdon, who had just arrived in Portugal, told Sky News: “Well, I’m a bit confused because I arrived today, and obviously hearing rumours about quarantine, my son and wife have not been able to join me.
“And my brother has had to rush home because he has to go to work and his son has to go to university.
“So it’s kind of a double edged sword for me.
“On one hand, it now sounds like my wife and son can come, which is fantastic, but my brother has now rushed home today and paid a ridiculous amount for a flight home and cut his holiday short from two weeks to four or five days.
“It’s just this kind of confusion that is difficult for people.
“It’s very unfair because people seem to be put on very short notice and not only is it very expensive, but they don’t know whether they are coming or going.
“I mean it’s understandable that there’s issues and that’s fine. There’s been a spike in Lisbon, which is perfectly understandable.
“But the Algarve, from the start of Covid, has been one of the safest places in the whole of Europe.
“So why does it seem to be constantly punished? I think the locals are the best people to ask because they are totally bemused.”
Pressure is now mounting on the government to introduce coronavirus tests at airports – allowing comprehensive border tests to override the two-week isolation periods.
Paul Charles, founder of the PC Agency of travel consultants, told The Times: “Only testing and more testing is the solution to walking the tricky tight-rope between health and economic priorities.
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“With over 30 other countries worldwide testing at airports, it’s still not clear why the UK is waiting to invest in such infrastructure.”
Meanwhile, cases in Greece are currently at a similar level to the UK.
People arriving in England from countries not on the travel corridor list are required to self-isolate for 14 days.