Vaxxed and Ready to Go - International Travel in Year 2 of COVID

This month I hit another milestone since the pandemic began – I took my first international trip!! As I wrote in my last piece, this trip was a last-minute change from my original plan which had been to go to Greece. Instead, I went to Austria which had much lower COVID levels and considered safe to visit but the UK, US, and the EU. It was amazing and I’ll do a review of Vienna and Melk, the two places I went, in a few days. But I wanted to do a separate piece about the pandemic-specific aspects of the trip.

The Covid of it All

Despite having some reservations about traveling internationally right now, I decided I was going to go on a proper trip, come hell or high water. It’d been two years since I went to Portugal and honestly, I hadn’t had an actual vacation, as in taking more than two days off work to create a 4-day weekend, since then. And despite Delta, I still feel like being vaccinated is a magic superpower that allows me to do things like travel.

Austria’s COVID restrictions were about what I was used to here in DC. Every site or museum I went to required masks when you’re indoors, as did trains and the metro system and I masked up every time I went into a store. A couple times there were requirements on what kind of mask you had to wear – ie you had to wear a surgical mask. I brought a bunch of KN-95 masks with me, and those were totally good for everyone.

The only real addition was having to prove you are COVID-free (with a negative test taken within the last 24 hours) or vaccinated with some frequency. I had to provide my vax card along with my passport when checking into my hotels, and when I went to a concert everyone had to be masked and vaxxed. But the main thing was I had to prove I was vaccinated at restaurants.

There were no mask requirements for dining, and the servers were all unmasked everywhere I went, but you had to show proof of vaccination in order to be seated. This wasn’t always true in Melk, but it was true for every place I went it Vienna. And for people here in the US who worry about that – it’s seriously no big deal. It’s like showing your ID at a bar. And luckily they were fine with me showing them a picture of it on my phone so I didn’t need to carry that awkwardly-sized CDC card around. Austria has a national vaccine pass app but Americans can’t use it at the moment.  

Getting in and out through passport control was really easy as well. Getting into Austria I just had to show my vax card as well as my passport, and I got a little slip of paper saying I was cleared for entering the country. After following the exit signs and flow of people down a few airport corridors, there was another gentleman who took our slips. And that was it!

Getting ready to come back to the US was a bit more stressful. The US requires a negative COVID test within 3 days of your flight. My flight back to the US was on Saturday so I took my test Thursday morning, and I was very anxious the night before. Not because I had symptoms or had done anything remotely risky, but because since the beginning the experts have been talking about how people can have asymptomatic COVID.

I’d checked before hand with the hotel concierge and COVID tests were available at any pharmacy (they call them apothecaries which I find both odd and delightfully medieval) and that there was one two blocks away.

COVID tests are free for Austrians via their national health care system, but as an American I had to pay to get one. The cost was 25 Euro which was cheaper than I expected. I got swabbed, gave them my email address, and 30 minutes later they emailed me the results. Super annoyingly, the email said “your test result are in” and I had to go to another website to actually get said results. Which were negative, for the record.

In the airport coming home, the only time I had to show the negative test results was to the flight crew at my gate. Before boarding even started there was line right before the gate and we showed our negative tests to the Austrian Airlines personnel. They stamped people’s boarding passes, or if you were like me and had the boarding pass on your phone, handed you a blank boarding pass and stamped it. I showed that when I scanned my boarding pass to get on the plane and that was it. The US must rely on those pre-flight checks because once I landed, I didn’t need to show it, or the official CDC form that I printed out and signed, to anyone including passport control in Dulles Airport.

In conclusion, international travel is doable and can still be a fantastic experience. My trip was everything I hope for and, honestly, needed. The only actually stressful thing was the fear of having asymptomatic COVID and not being able to get home. But that wasn’t anything even close to how awesome my trip was, or how great it was to take a trip. So my (unsolicited) advice to anyone who wants to travel even though the pandemic is continuing to continue, is to travel but travel smart. Check where is considered “safe” by not just the CDC but other international bodies, like the EU. And try to go someplace that isn’t swamped with tourists. One of my fears about Greece was that I’d potentially get COVID not from someone Greek, but from one of the unvaccinated tourists who were flocking to Greece. You don’t need to go off the beaten path – Vienna is very much on the beaten path – but it’s worth looking at less flashy locations that are safe and going there.

Travel is possible and it is still 100% worth it right now. Even more so now though, it’s important to travel smart and to travel safe. I refuse to let COVID take travel from me. You can still go and have amazing adventures right now. It just requires a bit more work and a bit more flexibility (and getting vaccinated of course). And it is totally worth it.