Missing the weekly update for April 1st

I’m waiting & wondering too…

I noticed that as well and for a moment I thought I had the date wrong. We leave April 20th, so I’ve been following these closely. I wondered if maybe now that tours are picking up if they’re too busy answering last minute questions.

Hmmm, I could swear I saw it early this morning when I was looking on my phone. It's clearly not there now. I must have been dreaming about travel ... that's not surprising.

We leave for Italy in a few weeks for our back to back RS tours. I have found the weekly tour reports reassuring. The lack of one this week is worrisome. I hope some of the forum posters who have traveled this week with a RS tour will report in although I know a lot of TM’s aren’t on the forum. I am also hoping that the tour office is just too busy to do the weekly report.

I’m missing the weekly report too. We are on the fence but the trip reports of how things are going was helping us lean to take the plunge and sign up. Maybe they are including some recent changes in requirements but I sure wish they would make this a priority.

Perhaps they didn't want to publish one on April fool's day.

While it's possible that the missing tour report is due to something negative or sinister, the most likely case is that someone forgot or that someone was too busy.

I am sure that the organization is quite busy! They have many tours in progress and there are probably many things to do that are not quite routine - this year seems extraordinary to me, and just having the 2 year break from tours means it's hard getting back into the swing of things.

I plan to wait at least 12 more minutes before I start to panic. Ok, that was a joke.

Seriously, so far I'm quite impressed with the organization and how they have handled the past two years of shutdown and this current year of reopening. And yes, I'm eager for my upcoming trip too!

Anyone else on Best of South Italy starting 4/25?

Tony

Can someone post the link to the On the Road reports? I can’t find it!!😆

Here you go:
https://www.ricksteves.com/tours/on-the-road-reports

@CWsocial That was the previous week’s report. The new one would be dated April 1.

I’m surprised this week’s update is still not posted. I wish they’d post “sorry for the delay” while pulling it together. With war and a pandemic, it’s easy to worry.

I can give you a live report from Belgium. I am on the 2nd “Heart of Belgium and Holland” tour. The first one started March 28, our tour started on March 30. We have a total of 19 travelers, a guide and an apprentice. We all had a negative Covid test within 48 hours of the first group meeting. Some people didn’t know about that and had to get a quick test that afternoon. We had scheduled a test several weeks before arriving. The first hotel scheduled it for me at a pharmacy. The test results are given with a QR code that is emailed and another code that is sent to your cell phone. You have to go online, enter the information and hope it works. We had trouble with all the forms, so the morning of our group gathering, Nico our guide was at the first hotel and helped us by going back to the pharmacy where we took the test and updating the info on a Belgian website. It was difficult and confusing, but it all worked out. Right before the first group meeting, we had to show our vaccination records to Nico. (That is the first time I have showed it here in Belgium. I have been here over a week.)

We have a fun group. We have worn masks at indoor activities (first group meeting, museums, churches) and on the bus. The mask is off during meals and while walking to different sites on our city walks and at the different cemeteries that we visited yesterday.

We couldn’t visit the Memling Museum here in Bruges as it is undergoing renovations. We visited Michaelangelo’s Bruges “Madonna and Child” instead. While Covid was going on, the Ghent Altarpiece was moved to a renovated new space in St. Bavo’s Cathedral. So, there have been some good things happening during all the shutdown’s.

Our weather has been very cold. We visited World War I cemeteries yesterday with snow. It was very pretty on the grounds around the headstones, but the wind was brutally cold. We enjoyed our lunch that included hot tea and coffee at the farmhouse.

Yesterday was the last day of school here for 2 weeks. The Easter holiday starts this weekend. The central squares were very full this afternoon with locals in addition to the tourists. They weren’t shopping at the tourist spots.

So far, the highlights are the chocolates! We aren’t beer drinkers, so the 1000 different beers of Belgium don’t mean much to us.

Janet, thanks for the update. I'm so glad to hear your trip is going well.

Thanks, Janet. I hope the rest of your tour goes well.

Janet! BRRRRR....but thanks for the update. I hadn't picked up that the Memling is closed so thanks for that intel!

it is still showing 25th March

I'm not at all concerned about the lack of report last week. RS is dropping the COVID testing requirement for tours commencing in May, and that doesn't indicate any kind of problems with their current tours. I'm guessing that as Carol suggested, they're just very busy right now. Each week, the number of new tours increases, and my husband and I have received several emails from the office this week about our Athens and the Heart of Greece tour which begins April 23. They have a lot more to keep track of in this environment!

It’s up now.

Can you please tell me where it says the RS testing requirement is being dropped in May?

Carla,
It is on this page
https://www.ricksteves.com/tours/coronavirus-faq