Thierry Breton, the European Union’s Internal Market Commissioner, said he hoped Europe would have a summer tourism season this year.
Travel activity will be closely tied to vaccine uptake and EU countries are busy trying to increase doses at the moment.
“We have to shift to the next gear,” he said when speaking about the vaccine campaign on RTL radio and the LCI TV channel.
“This will be the price for having a tourist season that I hope will be comparable to last year’s, which in the end wasn’t so bad in the context we’re in.”
The EU is planning to introduce what it is calling a Digital Green Certificate, which will show if a person has been vaccinated, received a negative test result or recovered from Covid-19.
A vaccine passport plus delivery of 420 million doses by mid-July should do wonders for the continent’s beleaguered tourism industry.
However, the rollout across the member states has not been straightforward so far. It has been slower than in other parts of the world and there has been resistance to the AstraZeneca vaccine as well as a diplomatic disagreement with the UK.