Flights hit £600 as Brits scramble to get back from Portugal before quarantine

Brits blasted the UK's quarantine plan as a 'shambles'.

Furious Brits have labelled the UK’s travel quarantine a ‘shambles’ after holidaymakers returning from Portugal scrambled to get home.

The tourist hotspot was moved to the 14-day quarantine list this morning at 4am – just weeks after it was named a safe travel destination.

Scotland and Wales had already imposed the mandatory quarantine on Portugal but England held out one more week because the country was ‘carrying out more testing’ and thereby had more cases.

The cost of flights soared to more than £600 after Thursday’s announcement as holidaymakers rushed to get home, Mail Online reported.

Most of the 35,000 Brits currently in Portugal will have no choice but to go into quarantine after they arrive back in the UK.

Simon Garner, from Suffolk, accused the airlines of profiteering on the back of the Government’s announcements after he and his wife paid £400 to come home early.

He said: ‘It’s a shambles, they don’t give you enough notice to come back, they should give you a week to come back safely.

‘They have allowed people to go out yesterday who have now got to come back today.

‘People have flown out with children and they have had to scramble back today, they have lost thousands.’

Abbie Willcox said she ‘felt sick’ after hearing the announcement after trying to get to Portugal three times this year.

She said: ‘Once Portugal was taken off the quarantine list two weeks ago we booked for this week thinking we would surely be fine.

‘We arrived at 2pm yesterday, and two hours later we found out about the quarantine news.

‘We immediately felt sick – neither of us can quarantine with work.’

Lorraine Norden, 65, who cut her holiday short by a week, said she didn’t feel safer in the UK than Portugal and observed that the Portuguese stuck by social distancing more than Brits.

Mrs Norden said: ‘To some extent I can see the rationale but when the infection rate is not much different compared to here it is a bit odd. 

‘This morning when we were at Faro airport the plane was so crowded, we were put in a situation that was more dangerous.’

Portugal was exempted from the UK’s travel quarantine rules on August 22.

However, the infection rate surged, rising above the safe travel threshold of 20 cases per 100,000 people. It now has 28.3 infections per 100,000 people.

Transport Secretary Grant Shapps initially declined to take the country off the safe travel list after acknowledging Portuguese authorities were testing more people and had more cases as a result.

The Portugal islands of Azores and Madeira remained on the safe travel list after producing ‘enhanced data’.

Hungary, Reunion and French Polynesia were also put on the quarantine list.

This week former prime minister Theresa May joined calls for the UK to introduce mandatory coronavirus testing at British airports in an effort to reduce the 14-day quarantine or remove it altogether.

But Boris Johnson said testing on arrival could give Brits a ‘false sense of security’ and would identify only 7% of virus cases.

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