Travel warning confusion

The United States issued a blanket warning yesterday for Americans in Europe, and I for the life of me can’t figure out what this is supposed to be. As an American living in Europe, I suppose I’m the intended recipient of this message. I’m sitting here at the Helsinki Airport ready to get on a flight to Brussels reading the US state department press release and the accompanying news coverage, and I’m left wondering what exactly the US government is telling me to do.

Despite issuing a blanket warning for Americans to avoid “public places” throughout the European continent until at least next year(what does that even mean?), a state department official on a press conference call today told reporters, “"We're not saying don't travel to Europe. We're not saying don't visit tourist, major tourist attractions or historic sites or monuments.” Yet they should register with the local US consulate (even if they’re only in Europe for a few days), avoid wearing or displaying anything that identifies them as American and try not to speak in loud voices with their American accents. Asking an American not to speak in a loud voice is probably as futile as asking an Italian not to talk with their hands, but that’s what they want.

US introduces entrance fee for European visitors

If you are European and wish to visit the United States, starting this month you will have to pay a $14-per-person entry fee for the privilege. The unilateral move by the US has come as quite a shock to the EU, especially since neither Brussels nor individual member states were consulted about it. And European leaders are in equal parts furious and bemused that the fee is ostensibly a “tourism promotion” tax on visitors. Now, the EU is considering a retaliatory measure charging Americans to enter Europe if the US refuses to scrap the fee.

Such a fee levied to visitors from countries that do not require a tourist visa is historically unheard of, and it appears to be a new concept the US is trying to introduce. But it’s an idea that members of the European Parliament meeting in Strasbourg last week were not receptive to, to say the least. Using strikingly strong language, MEPs expressed fury over this new “Electronic Travel Authorisation System” (ESTA), which they say amounts in effect to a unilateral visa.

Should the EU reimburse ash-stricken airlines?

Things are slowly returning to normal here in Europe, with air travel resuming across the continent. Thousands of passengers are still stranded in various destinations, but already the finger-pointing has begun for this enormously costly fiasco. And all of the chaos and recrimination has some asking the question - would a pan-EU aviation authority have averted this mess?

Flights have just gone back to 100% operation this afternoon. But the embarrassing reality is that they are not resuming because the ash has suddenly disappeared, but because a continued air travel ban was no longer economically sustainable. Now everyone is holding their breath to see if one of them falls out of the sky. So far, so good.

It's looking increasingly likely that an investigation will conclude that the flight ban, the biggest disruption in the history of civil aviation, was an unnecessary overreaction. If that is indeed the case, then the fight over who should shoulder the burden for the enormous losses the airlines have suffered is going to become fierce. A heated argument was developing yesterday between Ryanair and the EU over whether the ultra-budget airline would reimburse passengers for the hotel and meal costs they incurred while stranded by the volcanic ash cloud. CEO Michael O'Leary told Irish newspapers yesterday that it would refuse to comply with EU rules requiring airlines to reimburse passengers for these costs in the event of flight delays or cancellations.

Europe versus the volcano

As you're jetting around the world this week, Americans, think of us poor souls in Europe, trapped in our respective cities. We're now in the 5th day of the flight ban caused by the giant ash cloud covering Europe, and many are the stories of the "ash refugees" spread across not just Europe, but the entire world. I have a colleague trapped in Norway, my father's stuck in the US, and I have friends stuck in Southern France, Spain, Ireland, Bangkok, you name it.

The stories of people making long and bizarre treks across Europe via ground transport have been numerous. Saturday night I went to a friend's going-away party in Antwerp, and people there were full with stories about how they had made last-minute arrangements to get to Belgium by train after their flights were canceled.

Today Eastern Europe wakes to no borders

It’s official. As of this morning you can now drive from the Russian border in Estonia to the Atlantic beaches of Portugal, across 24 countries, without passing through a single border crossing. As of midnight, the 2004 EU entrants are now part of the Schengen Zone, the border-free area that allows you to pass through European countries as easily as if you were going from Indiana to Illinois.

Considering the post-cold war implications of this day (all but one of the 2004 entrants are former Warsaw Pact countries), the scenes last night were dripping with symbolism. As Canada’s Global Mail reports, at the border of Germany and Poland the guards spent yesterday removing kilometres of tall steel fence, leaving unmarked and unguarded fields between them. Fireworks lit up the border bridge between Poland and Germany in Frankfurt on Oder early this morning. On the road between Vienna and Bratislava, Austrian and Slovakian leaders met to saw through border-crossing barriers. And in Estonia, the government put its border-inspection stations up for auction. Perhaps nowhere was the scene more striking than on the Czech-Slovak border, as the countries were split apart just in 1993 and now find themselves without a border between them once again.