SIA has just sms all passenger last night with a booking that flights for 'transit' passengers have been cancelled.
New rules/plan out, as per tripperhead...
Countries divided into A, B, C, D - A divided into A1 and A2.
A2 is current 'banned' countries (UK, Ireland, South Africa, Brazil) plus apparently Philippines, India, Indonesia and Pakistan to join. A1 is countries temporarily banned because of too many imports etc.
B and C are high/medium risk countries. D is low-risk, currently Singapore, Australia and New Zealand. Vaccinated arrivals from B and C will go to 2 weeks hotel quarantine, D will go to 1 week - at some unknown point in the future.
Countries will move between groups depending on infection levels, variants, vaccinations, etc.
Thanks.
I focused on one extract which is a MASSIVE change of direction
'At the same time, a newly added place-specific flight suspension mechanism also took effect in parallel. If a total of five or more passengers among all flights from the same place, regardless of airline, were confirmed by arrival tests for COVID-19 with the N501Y mutant strain (variant of concern as identified by the World Health Organization) within a seven-day period, the Government would invoke Cap. 599H to prohibit all passenger flights from that place from landing in Hong Kong for 14 days, and would at the same time specify that place as an extremely high-risk place under Cap. 599H to restrict persons who have stayed in that place for more than two hours from boarding passenger flights for Hong Kong for 14 days'
Previously it was only a particular flight that would be suspended so let's say a carrier had two separate flights from the same place, only one flight would be prevented from bringing passengers to HK. Now if one place has 5 501Y cases then the entire place is suspended for 14 days. How unfair is that to an airline that gets suspended because another carrier failed? And then there is the automatic trigger to mandate that place of origin as a high risk country for FIVE imports.
Sheer lunacy descending almost into farce. Quite frankly I salute any airline that keeps flying into HK in the face of such restrictions on top of everything else they have had to put up with (QT for crew for example) and would not blame any airline for saying you know what, frankly the effort no longer justifies the reward.
Last edited by ByeByeEngland; 15-04-2021 at 11:21 AM.
there's always CX... so why worry... you don't need so many competitors of flights now and once the situation normalizes all the airlines will queue up to come back in again...Original Post Deleted
Is there any outline of possible next round of regulations after this new round of differentiated inbound immigration/quarantine regulations? Has there been any articulation of criteria such as X% of vaccinations in HK? This would help predicting/planning, however tentative and contingent it may be.