The European Tourism Manifesto alliance, made up of over 70 European public and private tourism-related organisations (including EBI), has published a position paper in response to the European Commission’s Proposals for updated Council Recommendations for Intra-EU travel and for inbound travel to the EU. The paper welcomes the European Commission’s efforts to ensure a coordinated approach to travel measures and support the proposal by which a valid EU Digital COVID Certificate (DCC) is sufficient to travel without additional requirements (no further testing or quarantine).

It further highlights the following key points:

• The recommendation to shorten vaccine certificate validity to nine months and require an additional dose will create asymmetry between EU countries with different national vaccination levels as well as additional dose availability.

• The implementation date of 10^th January 2022 proposed by the European Commission would be too late to positively impact the Christmas holidays as both citizens and industry require certainty and coherent rules to prepare for end-of-year travel. 
• It is necessary to swiftly adopt the existing EU Digital Passenger Locator Form (dPLF) to achieve further harmonisation of travel measures and facilitate contact tracing across EU borders.

• The additional requirement of providing a negative PCR test for travellers vaccinated with a WHO-approved, but not EMA-approved vaccine, could create a two-tier system that would become very difficult to put in place. It is needed to recognise the whole list of WHO-approved vaccines without additional requirements for travellers.