August 30th - Montenegro Evacuation Chaos
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 30 August 2021
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Chaos on evacuation flight from red-list Montenegro
Concern that the European Union could reinstate restrictions on American visitors.
And Qantas sets out its plans for December onwards.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, it's Monday the 29th of August and thanks for joining me for the latest on travel and destinations from the Greenlist and the travel desk of the independent, currently located at Babacom Beach in the beautiful county of Devon. |
| 0:17.8 | Behind me you can hear the English Channel and it's a lovely day to be here with the sun |
| 0:24.1 | just peeking out. Anyway, not everyone who wishes to be in the UK is here at the moment overnight. |
| 0:33.5 | The evacuation flight that EasyJet had put on four holidaymakers and others coming back from Montenegro before the 4am Monday deadline, |
| 0:43.9 | which meant, of course, that anyone after that deadline has to go into hotel quarantine, well, it all went very badly wrong. |
| 0:53.2 | EasyJet have put on this extra flight, or rather moved their |
| 0:57.0 | Monday departure of a day earlier. They were selling tickets at £265 each. Unfortunately, |
| 1:03.0 | the plane went tech. I think that Brexit then played a part because since we have left the European Union, there was problems over |
| 1:12.4 | licensing the engineer. That may or may not be the case, but what we definitely know is that |
| 1:19.0 | another plane was dispatched from Manchester to pick up the stranded travellers. Now, where it went was the exciting thing. There's an international airport |
| 1:30.8 | at Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro. The airport at Tevac wasn't open long enough for that |
| 1:37.8 | to happen, but instead the plane was dispatched to Dubrovnik Airport. Now, if you know |
| 1:43.3 | Dubrovnik Airport, you will know that it's just |
| 1:45.8 | a few kilometres or miles from the Montenegrin border. And that seems to make sense, except that |
| 1:53.8 | there are at least 26 people on board who were not entitled to enter the European Union. |
| 2:01.4 | I think it, again, would have been all right if Brexit hadn't happened, |
| 2:04.9 | but as it was, they were predictably turned away |
| 2:08.3 | and taken back on buses to Tevac, where they'd started. |
| 2:13.0 | Now they are facing 11 nights of hotel quarantine |
| 2:17.3 | at a cost of around £2,000 per person. |
| 2:21.7 | Needless to say, there's a lot of concern about this. |
| 2:23.7 | The plane itself from Dubrovnik apparently only made it to Gatwick with minutes to spare. |
... |
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