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Coronavirus: Thailand’s Phuket reopening plan holds a model for Asia as travel bubbles deflate
- Under the Phuket Sandbox plan, vaccinated visitors who aren’t coming from high-risk nations can travel quarantine-free to the island from July 1
- Asia has been slow to reopen due to sluggish jab roll-outs and many countries still enforce lockdowns in a bid to keep virus cases at or close to zero
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Thailand’s plan to reopen the tourist haven of Phuket could become a model for other holiday hotspots in Asia to prise open their borders and bring in visitors as strategies such as travel bubbles falter, according to the founder of Banyan Tree Holdings.
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Tourism-reliant Thailand aims to allow quarantine-free travel to its prime destination from July 1 for the first time in more than a year, provided visitors are inoculated against Covid-19 and aren’t coming from high-risk countries.
The so-called Phuket Sandbox plan is dependent on the vaccination rate among the island’s residents hitting at least 70 per cent. It currently stands at about 60 per cent, far higher than the 5 per cent nationwide, after a concerted push to get locals vaccinated.
“Every government is beginning to feel around on how to open up, and the Phuket Sandbox is really a viable way now because even the travel bubbles that people talked about didn’t take place,” Banyan Tree executive chairman Ho Kwon Ping said in an interview on Monday.
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“It’s the first time anywhere east of the Maldives that you have a country with this population size with such a low vaccination rate actually opening up to the rest of the world.”
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