In the last couple of months, I’ve travelled the world while lying on the rug on my stomach, first to a Croatian island, thanks to Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Flights and then on to Albania, with Rene Karabash’s Ostajnica.
 
Recognising the increasing number of armchair travellers like me, some forward-thinking booksellers back home have launched a digital platform called booktrips which fully resembles a travel metasearch engine, but with an unexpected twist – after setting your dream destination and ideal travel dates, the platform offers you the best ‘travel’ option in the form of a travel book.
 
Amidst travel bans and self-isolation, reading has been a pretty successful distraction for me from the million-dollar question: when will travel recover? 
 
Earlier this month, research showed that testing air passengers for Covid-19 after five days of quarantine is between 83% and 90% effective, suggesting that the UK’s 14-day quarantine strategy could be reduced to only five days. This has raised travel industry leaders’ hopes that the government could revise its travel quarantine policy and introduce pre-flight tests after England’s lockdown ends on 2 December.
 
The research gave aviation executives the means to press for a system which would see air passengers take a PCR test 72 hours prior to travel and then another high-speed test at the airport. The Department for Transport dashed some of these hopes yesterday though, after stating that most rapid tests are unlikely to meet the required standard of 99% specificity that would enable identifying only real cases and avoid false positives when testing passengers arriving in the UK.
 
With statistics showing that the UK’s aviation industry has been among those worse affected since March, much more than our wanderlust seems to be at stake, as the industry awaits an announcement from the Travel Task Force on potential routes to reducing the UK’s travel quarantine.