Dear Reader

‘GRADUALLY, then suddenly’, Ernest Hemingway wrote in his novel The Sun Also Rises.

He was referencing how we don’t see change occurring until it becomes something dramatic. And the same could be said of travel over the past seven days.

After 18 months of the Government refusing to budge on its onerous and costly testing requirements and broken traffic light system, travel is back with a bang.

First, we had Transport Secretary Grant Shapps and Co. announcing a major relaxation of international travel rules, opening up some of the world’s most glorious corners.

Then, out of nowhere just three days later, President Joe Biden announced at the start of Boris Johnson’s big trip to Washington that he would unlock the rusty padlock and open the gate to Britons from November.

Few saw it coming. Even the Prime Minister appeared to have been taken aback, telling reporters just hours before on the plane over: ‘I don’t think this is necessarily going to be fixed this week . . . I wouldn’t necessarily hold my breath’. Well, he can take a big sigh of relief now.

Boris had been trying to wake Sleepy Joe for a while. Britain dropped restrictions on fully vaccinated U.S. visitors in July, presumably in the hope the gesture would be reciprocated.

America offers rich pickings for tourists, which is why we’ve dedicated three pages to some of the country’s most magical holidays, whether that’s watching the twinkling lights while Christmas shopping in New York, or hitting the highway for a road trip along California’s Big Sur.

The Government’s travel policies still have some way to go, for example, opening up South Africa (pictured) to holidays — the country’s Covid rates are ten times lower than ours and a third of France’s. But that won’t stop us celebrating recent breakthroughs. Finally, the travel industry can begin lifting itself off its bruised and battered knees.