Travel returnee

TAIPEI – For the first time since the lockdowns three years ago, I am traveling overseas again.

After going through pandemic nightmare, I still have some residual COVID paranoia, so I’m moving slowly, picking a destination just a short hop from the Philippines, and staying away for only a few days.

Also, Taiwan still allows visa-free entry for Filipino tourists staying for up to 14 days. The visa exemption ends on July 31. It’s not reciprocal; the Philippines requires Taiwanese travelers to obtain a visa. So Taipei is studying whether to again extend its visa exemption program for Philippine passport holders.

The visa fees collected from Taiwanese travelers reportedly go to the upkeep of the Manila Economic and Cultural Office in Taipei. If the visa exemption is reciprocal, we could get more visitors from Taiwan. It’s a high-income economy and the Taiwanese can contribute much to our tourism revenues. Are the visa fees worth the potential losses in tourism earnings?

There was a long line of foreign arrivals at Taipei immigration, but I cleared it in 20 minutes and retrieved my luggage in five minutes.

At the Ninoy Aquino International Airport Terminal 1, most people still wore masks, but distancing was difficult. Here in Taiwan, masking is no longer mandatory, but all airport personnel still wore masks. Among the arrivals, all the Caucasians had no mask; nearly all the Asians had masks on.

Taiwan, which continues to be kept out of the World Health Organization even as an observer due to pressure from China, had one of the most effective preventive responses to COVID.

Taipei had learned its lesson from the SARS epidemic. In January 2020, as stories came out about a deadly virus that had emerged from China’s Wuhan City, Taiwan made face masks readily available to its population even as Taiwanese manufacturers quickly churned out more. As narrated to me by a long-time resident, a highly efficient contact tracing system quickly went into effect.

*      *      *

In our country, everyone at the onset of the pandemic including health frontliners scrambled for face masks and personal protective equipment while the government focused on locking down everyone at home and hammering out a sweetheart PPE supply deal with well-connected lucky firm Pharmally Pharmaceuticals.

Taiwan’s new resident representative in the Philippines, Wallace Minn-Gan Chow, told The STAR shortly upon his arrival that while Taipei had an exemplary preventive response to the spread of COVID, it moved rather late in obtaining the vaccines.

This was partly due to vaccine hesitancy at the time, and also reportedly because Taiwan was moving to produce its own COVID vaccine.

In 2021, an infected China Airlines flight crew triggered a COVID surge in Taiwan. Even as the virus raged across the island, however, schools were shut down only for two weeks and Taiwan closed its borders to foreign arrivals only for a month. The long-time resident sent me photos and video showing her freely riding the mass transport system, attending mass and strolling along the beach.

My China Airlines / Philippine Airlines flight coming here was full, but I no longer felt apprehensive about infection. Many of my relatives and friends resumed traveling overseas as early as a year ago; I became the last holdout.

New Health Secretary Ted Herbosa is right; the national COVID health emergency can be declared over. But before this happens, the government should first obtain the free bivalent vaccines under the COVAX Facility.

In Manila, getting my e-travel QR code was a breeze. At the airport, no one asked for any COVID vaccination information.

The NAIA-1 has changed little since the pre-pandemic days. A new feature (for a travel returnee like me) was the self-administered COVID antigen testing kiosk at the pre-departure area.

*      *      *

Because my carrier is Philippine Airlines, I was worried about a flight cancellation or being offloaded. But it turned out to be a co-share with China Airlines, and the flight pushed through, landing on the dot here in Taiwan. Online check-in, however, was initially problematic because it turned out that I had to use the China Airlines website instead of PAL.

My return flight is operated by PAL, so I’m not yet assured of a glitch-free return.

I don’t know if China Airlines is also plagued by flight cancellations. To be fair to our local carriers PAL and Cebu Pacific, the problem is global, and revenge travel is not the only reason.

As foreign media organizations have reported, the culprit is US aerospace manufacturer Pratt & Whitney, whose engine issues in Airbus planes have led to the grounding of at least 120 commercial aircraft worldwide.

Civil Aeronautics Board executive director Carmelo Arcilla told “The Chiefs” on One News that local carriers have been forced to ground aircraft and scramble to order new ones that do not use Pratt & Whitney parts.

Obviously, you don’t procure aircraft as easily as ordering from Shopee. While waiting for the arrival of additional planes, Arcilla said local carriers have been forced to reduce the number of flights.

Since many flights are booked months in advance, however, this has led to flight cancellations and what looks like overbooking.

As many affected passengers have groused, while they understand the situation, they want the carriers to do better in providing early notification of affected flights and minimizing the inconvenience to passengers.

Arcilla told The Chiefs that air passengers have the right to be checked into the flight that they booked. Under reasonable circumstances, the airline can cancel the booking, but some form of compensation is typically dangled to those affected.

I’ll worry about my return flight later.

Right now, I’ve gingerly settled into a room at the Grand Hyatt Taipei, no longer (overly) worried about the Wuhan virus and its highly mutated subvariants lurking in the bedsheets and bathroom items.

Another COVID-related nightmare could turn me into a paranoid recluse for life. But as of now, I’m ready to move on from the pandemic with the rest of the world.