TravelTalkOnline Forums Travel and Vacation Forums St. Maarten - St. Martin Canadian Travel Requirements To Change?

Canadian news outlets are reporting today that the government is considering removing the PCR test for returning fully vaccinated travellers. Announcement possibly next week.
Now that would make travelling easier. No need to schedule testing appointments and make timetable windows.

Awesome news! I just hope it will come true… With our idiot PM you can expect anything….

Hoping US would do the same.

Not as good as news as you think. We have to do a rapid antigen test instead of a PCR to return to Canada. This isn’t really isn’t much of an improvement.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coron...anadian-travellers-source-says-1.5778453

Antigen tests are somewhat easier to obtain and somewhat cheaper, so it is a bit of an improvement.

More news to come out this week in Canada about travel restrictions being changed. It’s just disappointing when the headline reads that Canada is removing testing but then a few paragraphs down, they slide in the “ oh, but you still need and antigen test” and you’re going still then be tested on arrival in Canada so you get to go home after your trip and have to quarantine for another possible week while you wait for your PCR test report from the Airport. This will make no difference to Canadians travelling if we still have to do PCR tests on arrival in Canadian airports upon arrival back to Canada.

we paid $123 Canadian each last week for rtpcr tests both negative. This is not uploaded to arrivecan & not acknowledged when you land in canada. We needed it to get on WestJet. Upon arrival in Canada we were "randomly" selected as were a lot of people to have another rtpcr test there. They randomly tested an entire WestJet plane a week earlier. Tests go to different labs so my husband's came back next day mine took 3 days. We had to stay in until we got results meanwhile they put people on a connecting flight out west to isolate after their test. Really!! Make sense to anybody?

Agreed, apart from the lower cost for the traveller it is no improvement. It also puts marginally less load on the medical lab facilities in the country you are flying out of which may be stretched. Still a waste of resources though and it's arguably immoral and unethical to knowingly waste healthcare resources. Booking a trip right now for November - by when we hope common sense will have prevailed (although that commodity is in short supply here in the nation's capital right now...).
Dave

Waste of money, time, resources, increased aggravation and complications for travellers with absolutely ZERO benefits for anyone EXEPT those who are getting paid for testing and test makers…. It’s all about MONEY now….

Yep, about like a lot of other things associated with this.