Covid-era travel between countries

they generally look back 14 days, but each country is different.

It isn't so much "citizens" as residents

jggordon54, my understanding is that most countries are trying to stop people from coming in from places of uncontrolled disease or virulent outbreaks, regardless of citizenship. And they are judging whole countries. After all, you could be a vaccinated American citizen, who has been living in India or Brazil for a year, and trying to enter a country that does not have a minimally vaccinated population. Your citizenship in that case is not as relevant as where you're coming from. Admittedly, much of the information that gets passed around via media glosses over the difference, and sometimes you can detect a loss in translation, but the basic principle is to keep people that might be carriers out.

It varies. We are flying into London and wanted to go directly to Italy, but Italy requires quarantine if you have been in the UK in the prior 14 days, even just to change planes. Switzerland, OTOH, says "Come on down!" So we will fly into Geneva and spend 3 or 4 weeks in Switzerland before dipping into the Dolomites.

As Nigel and Laurel said, it depends- some countries have an amount of time before you are “cleansed” from your origin point, and some don’t mention anything.

This is part of why it is so confusing to travel among European countries right now.

And all of that is what prompted this:

https://community.ricksteves.com/travel-forum/general-europe/one-key-thought-on-traveling-in-europe-for-the-time-being

We’re flying British Air, changing at LHR to go to Rome. That was going to work a few weeks ago. Don’t think we can get a flight with BA without changing in London

Sue, you cannot get a BA flight without landing in London. It is messy. Maybe in a few more weeks everyone will work out that vaccinated people do not need to quarantine. If it works in Switzerland, for example, maybe Italy will relent on those of us who merely change planes at LHR.

Or maybe in a few weeks Switzerland will require quarantine as well? Things are changing. (And given the current situation in the UK, avoiding a transfer there can be a good idea.)

It can always change for the worse, but in tracking as many countries as possible these past few months, almost with out exception, things are getting better and easier for US travelers to Europe.

I am in my first of 5 countries of my 30 day trip, and at least the first country relaxed requirements before I arrived making my test unnecessary.

The others were chosen in part on the ease if entry. I guess I will discover if I choose well.

Right now we are in the same boat on transit through LHR. We had a huge amount of BA miles we wanted to use up, thus BA. (Long story on how we ended up with those). As it stands today, we still need an antigen test to just transit LHR even though we are staying airside for only a couple of hours before we go to Geneva.

We’ll be in Switzerland for 9 days before transit to Austria so hoping 9 days works rather than 10 days. After Austria, by the time we get to Slovenia will have been in Schengen countries for almost 3 weeks. We transit back through LHR almost a week later but have to get an antigen to get back to US anyway so thinking should be OK. That is the problem with BA though, you pretty much are stuck going through LHR from the States.

Has anyone done the LHR transit to Switzerland yet?