Transat A.T. Inc., its employees and customers will be supporting the humanitarian efforts of SOS Children’s Villages in Ukraine. The company is launching a fundraising campaign to assist SOS Children’s Villages, its long-time partner that has rapidly scaled up its response in Ukraine to meet the critical needs of approximately 500,000 vulnerable children and families affected by the conflict. The campaign calls on its employees, as well as those of the nearly 300 travel agencies that make up its distribution network, the largest in Canada with 2,000 travel counsellors. Air Transat passengers are also being invited to make a donation Read more
Canada
Canadians are booking trips to Europe and the U.S.. Cruise companies are expanding rapidly. And new hotels are being built in Canada around the world. The latest RBC consumer tracking figures for Canada finds that travel spending recently touched pre-COVID levels for the first time as pandemic restrictions eased. “The domestic tourism recovery continues to outpace international travel but Canadian spending on restaurants and hotels abroad has also been rising,” RBC said. Meanwhile, the American Automobile Association this week said cruise bookings during the past four weeks are twice as high as this time last year. Just 612 Canadians visited Read more
Reuters reports that the U.S. Travel Association is urging President Joe Biden “to lift COVID-19 travel restrictions and repeal a mandate requiring masks on airplanes and in other transit modes by April 18.” The news outlet says it has seen a letter from the group to Dr. Ashish Jha, the incoming White House COVID response coordinator, that calls for an immediate end to the pre-departure testing requirement for all fully vaccinated inbound international persons and ending the mask mandate by April 18 “or announcing a plan and timeline to repeal the federal mask mandate within the subsequent 90 days.” “It Read more
The new travel rules for Canada should be a big help to tourism in border cities, but two Ontario mayors are angry that the rules aren’t changing until the start of next month. The Justin Trudeau government on Thursday said that fully vaccinated residents and visitors to Canada will no longer need to show a negative pre-arrival test result as of April 1. But the mayors of both Sarnia and Niagara Falls say the move should have taken effect right away. “Tell us a legitimate reason you can’t (end the testing requirements) tomorrow night,” Sarnia Mayor Mike Bradley told the Read more
Canada isn’t the happiest place on earth, but it’s top of the heap in North America. A World Happiness Report rankings, based largely on life evaluations from the Gallup World Poll, finds that Canada is #15 in the world on the happiness scale. That’s one spot ahead of the United States, and two ahead of the United Kingdom. On the other hand, Canada was tenth in 2020 and ninth in the world in 2019, so perhaps we’re slipping. For the fifth year in a row, Finland came in as the world’s happiest country, based on such factors as healthy life Read more
