Now We Have NZ, These Three Countries Are Most Likely To Be Our Next Travel Bubbles
It feels like there have been rumours of travel bubbles ever since Australia’s international borders first closed. For the most part, I’ve learned not to believe anything until it officially happens. The thing is since the Trans Tasman Bubble very much exists now, it’s started to feel more realistic that these other rumoured travel agreements could happen.
So which countries are we most likely to be able to travel to next? Well look, again it depends on a lot of factors — including how it would affect our current bubble with NZ — but officials have commented on more than one possibility. Let’s take a look.
Singapore
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Next up is probably going to be Singapore, who have been open to Australia with no quarantine (conditionally) since October 2020 and have been reported to be looking at lifting restrictions on Aussie passports as early as July. They’ve already got a travel bubble happening with Hong Kong, so it’s all good signs.
Federal Tourism Minister Dan Tehan even noted that “obviously, Singapore would be a very good next step to build on what we have already achieved with New Zealand. But we’ll take our time, we’ll work that through, and we’ll make sure that we have got the expert medical advice backing our assessment that that is the way that we should proceed”.
Japan
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Mr Tehan also noted that “we could look at other countries such as Japan, such as Vietnam, which has also done a very good job at dealing with COVID-19”.
Famously, Japan is hosting the 2021 Olympic games and there had been high hopes for a travel bubble to be in place before then. While that seems unlikely at this point, it’s still possible that we’ll have one by the end of the year.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison also noted that a travel bubble with other countries maintaining low Covid numbers could happen, and he specifically named Japan — although he followed it up with “at this stage we are not in a position to move forward on any of those”.
Fiji
The South Pacific is another area of the world where we could realistically get to in the not-so-distant future. Particularly Fiji, where they’ve only had 67 Covid cases and two deaths.
As per ‘Bula Bubble’ talks as early as June last year, the bubble may still require travellers to return a negative Covid test 48 hours before departure.
Of course, even if and when these quarantine-free bubbles do come true, we should probably be expecting some vaccination and contract tracing requirements.
(Lead image: Pexels / Palu Malerba)
