Covid-19 vaccines and boosters are losing their importance for world travelers. There are now more countries and territories—118, according to Kayak.com data—that welcome any US traveler without restrictions. Of the 109 destinations that still require testing, quarantines, or both for unvaccinated travelers, 17 don’t allow US tourism anyway.
It’s a welcome turn for a global tourism economy that’s been hammered by the novel coronavirus, and a bright note for those looking for signs of the pandemic’s end.
The pullback in restrictions is “an acknowledgment that we’re in a new phase of this pandemic, where things are more stable,” says infectious disease epidemiologist David Dowdy of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. As recently as Sept. 14, the head of the World Health Organization declared that “ the end is in sight” for the pandemic.
“The world increasingly wants to move past this point where Covid is overpowering our daily lives with everything we’re doing,” says Katrine Wallace, an epidemiologist at the University of Illinois, Chicago.
On Tuesday, Japan began accepting vaccinated visitors from 68 countries without visas, ending almost three years of strict travel curbs that kept tourists out of the island nation; unvaccinated visitors will still need to test negative and possibly quarantine upon arrival.
Bhutan, a top destination for its awe-inspiring mountain views, spicy cuisine, and gilded temples, entirely scrapped its pandemic-related entry requirements for international tourists as of Sept. 23, adding to the 30 destinations that ended testing and isolation mandates over the last seven weeks. The Himalayan kingdom joins Canada, the Bahamas, and New Zealand, which also rolled back requirements for travelers recently.
Aside from mainland China, which remains off-limits for tourists, the US, the Philippines, and Indonesia are now the world’s only major tourist markets whose borders are fully shut to unvaccinated visitors, barring age or health-related exceptions.
Experts attribute the changes in policy to a relative stabilization in death rates, despite a surge in infections due to the Omicron subvariant known as BA.5. That’s a result of mass-scale vaccination and booster campaigns, they say.
“We’re in a very different place today than we were two years ago, or even one year ago,” says Dr. Wafaa El-Sadr, professor of epidemiology and medicine at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. “We have a deeper understanding about this virus, how we can manage it better, and we have several vaccines that are increasingly available, which help alleviate concerns about Covid.”
Having a vaccine is, of course, still the safest and smoothest way to see the world. It opens American passports to a potential 190 stamps without any testing complications.