If your thinking to travel the the Philippines

Do you mean Thailand transit rules?

I know that some countries have specific covid rules for transit.

I also noticed that most KLM flights are transiting through BKK now, it's quite far into the new year before the Taipei route is available again.

I think given how long it is since I was over there that I will put a ceiling of £2000 for a return flight for just me, I don't want to spend that much but it looks like if I have to book late (close to date of travel) it will cost around that much.

I'm getting £1303 return on Emirates for Feb, and for the same dates about £1700 for KLM my preferred carrier, the KLM route is via BKK and is different on the way back and includes a Singapore airline leg, at least with Emirates it is the same carrier all the way there and back although I didn't really enjoy my transit in Dubai the last time I travelled that route.

You can get transit flights where your baggage is checked through end to end without a need to pass through immigration at the transit point, my last flight was KLM and Singapore Airlines via AMS and Changi as long as you book with a primary carrier you can get end to end transit but you do have to check that this is the case when booking.

It's not really a con, the airlines have too much capacity for the routes they fly as a result of Covid, most of them have the same fleet management costs they had before the pandemic unless they were able to get out of some of their aircraft leasing agreements, KLM owns a lot of its fleet so it must be badly hit, and in a lot of cases they will have the same staffing costs as before, remember planes on the ground still cost money.

They will be pricing based on optimising bums on seats for every segment some routes will be harder to run full.

It is an industry that works on tight margins, the reality is that flights are going to be very expensive for a long time to come I think.

edit: KLM are drawing attention to Covid rules for transit at BKK so you are right there could be problems.

What aircraft are they using to operate the BKK to Philippines route? And would that normally be a popular route?

The Emirates flight I am looking at for late January is £1303 normally at that time of year I would have expected MAN->DBX->MNL to cost about £550 there should have been plenty of deals at that price, right now with the quarantine and visa restrictions imposed by the Philippines I bet a lot of these flights are flying half empty so they have to make up the costs somehow.

Even in the best of times airlines are operating on razor thin margins, this is from a couple of years back Here's the Average Per-Passenger Profit that Airlines Make | Money

It's closer to 70% you can't really count single dose vaccinations as single vaccination offers very little protection, so 45/67 (millions) is about 70% full vaccinated.

I don't blame any country who imposes entry restrictions on Brits, we allowed our case numbers to remain high by insisting on an early end to all measures whereas the continent who now have significantly lower case loads than we do maintained social distancing in public and retained mask requirements.

Why couldn't we have done that, the theory was/is that by having our exit wave in the summer there would be less harm than having it in the winter along with flu, the idea was that vaccination numbers would eventually catch up and overall we would be well protected by winter, but look at Europe most of them have higher per capita vaccination statistics than us now and they have much lower case loads much lower hospital admissions and about half the death rate, why would any of these countries want to allow UK travellers a proportion of whom will be unvaccinated and a proportion of whom will be infected, even though vaccinated, to visit their territory.

In the event most of Europe has not been punitive to the UK in terms of restrictions on travel but other countries like the Phils have every right to my mind to protect themselves from further cases turning up on their doorstep, remember the Kent Alpha variant arose in the UK and it is thought that we exported that to India where it mutated into Delta then came back to bite our arse. These other countries with low vaccination rates like the Phils are protecting themselves from the potential import of new variants as well as case numbers and don't forget that's what we have supposedly been doing since April with our inbound travel restrictions.

High case numbers equals a higher possibility of a new mutant variant appearing, the only good thing about delta is that it is so infectious that any new mutant would need to be even more infectious than delta in order to out compete it.

Yes the rules in the Philippines make little sense as Delta is clearly becoming dominant there as everywhere and their testing is not sufficient to reveal the true extent of their local epidemic which like India is likely a lot worse than it looks on the surface and yes the numbers of infected travellers they would allow in are probably not large enough to make the situation a lot worse than it is now, but they are so far from being close to well protected that the restrictions they have are one of the few ways they have to do anything about it at all.

Surprised the airlines even let them board, I was prevented from boarding at Glasgow airport in December 2008 by KLM staff (a business class flight) simply because my passport only had 4 months remaining at that time.

Agreed but....

Second highest daily new case rate in the world as of yesterday and ninth highest numeric deaths per day, admittedly Philippines ranks sixth in daily numeric deaths just now.

Our cases might be in vaccinated people who don't die as much but they can still spread it in a country where most are unvaccinated and more likely to die.

I'd love to see them open up from a purely selfish viewpoint I want to travel, but I completely understand if they don't want visitors from countries where the virus is circulating freely.

Case rate:



Death rate:

The problem is that there is an implied required acceptance by the UK of the VaxCertPH vaccine passport and that means the UK would have to accept the Sinovac and Sinopharm vaccines which for political and possibly technical reasons some consider to be not very good.

I think it is implied that if we accept their VaxCertPH then they will probably put us on their green list otherwise they won't, I'm thinking now that it is going to be a very long time before this is resolved.