Weekend in Stuttgart - any issues?
Hi,
My girlfriend and I have a weekend away in Germany booked for this week (9th to 12th October) and we are flying into Stuttgart. Given the current situation I just wanted to see if anyone had any recent experience that might be relevant or an angle I hadn't thought about.
Entry restrictions
I am a UK citizen but my girlfriend has a Philippines passport. She is in the UK on a 5 year T2 visa sponsored by her employer. She also has a 6 month Schengen visa which she will be using to enter Germany. As far as I can tell all covid-related restrictions are based on where you have physically been recently and not nationality so I don't anticipate any specific problems for her?
High-risk areas
I have been carefully following the list of high-risk areas (I can't link but at rki.de) and since we live in the south-east and are flying via Heathrow we are not currently affected. I assume we won't be asked for evidence that we haven't been to (say) Yorkshire in the last 14 days because what would that even be?
So in the hope that nothing changes I think we will be allowed into Germany and allowed to stay in our booked hotel without any problems?
Future changes
Given rising cases in the UK I am concerned that more high risk areas will be added soon. It seems like the list of high risk areas gets updated once or twice a week, usually in the afternoon. If London got added while we were in Germany would that be OK & could we complete our holiday without quarantining? There's also the edge case where it gets changed during our flight or something but I think I just have to cross my fingers about that one.
Covid testing
If the risk areas get updated to include London or places we've been then my current thinking is that we'd have to cancel the holiday. The possible alternative is getting a covid test done but it needs to be in the 48 hours before arrival in Germany. There are few providers even in London who guarantee that and if they do the cost seems very high. At a stretch I might be prepared to pay £200 per person if there was a good level of confidence that there would be a prompt result but I'm seeing prices closer to £500 per person.
It seems like the covid testing on arrival at Stuttgart is not suitable since the result arrives in the post and takes 3 days. One option is to rebook the flight to another airport if other places have more speedy covid testing? I'm not sure I have much appetite for doing that, this trip has already been rearranged a couple of times & there are limits to how much replanning I fancy.
Conclusion
This turned into more of a train-of-thought than a concrete question - as you can tell I'm a bit anxious! I'll update at the weekend with what ended up happening.