Appearing on Sky News on Tuesday morning (26 January), Nadhim Zahawi said with the UK’s vaccination programme having only just reached what he described as "base camp" and with tougher border measures imminent to guard against the import of new strains of coronavirus, the focus must be on protecting that vaccination process.
Zahawi confirmed an announcement on "quarantine hotels" would follow later on Tuesday after several days of speculation and trails, although he refused to be drawn on specifics.
Asked by presenter Niall Paterson whether his advice to people thinking about booking a summer holiday right now would be "don’t", Zahawi replied: "Absolutely."
"At the moment, we’ve reached base camp with the vaccine deployment programme, over six and a half million people now with the first dose. There’s a long way to go.
"There’s still 37,000 people in hospital with Covid at the moment. It’s far too early for us to even speculate about the summer."
On the subject of quarantine hotels, Zahawi said as more people were vaccinated it became increasingly important to guard against new variants, stressing the quarantine hotel policy was part of broader review of measures at the UK’s borders.
"Once you have that protection [from the vaccine], and you don’t have new variants in the country, you should protect against them," said Zahawi.
"It is when they are spreading that it becomes negligible in terms of difference in terms of what you do at the border once they are already on your shores and spreading heavily."
Appearing ahead of Zahawi, TTG editor Sophie Griffiths said the quarantine hotel policy would come as another major blow to the travel sector, particular amid an upturn in people looking to make holiday plans.
"We’ve seen an increase in people making enquiries for holidays, and we’ve seen an increase in people actually booking," said Griffiths.
"They want to go away, and if we don’t have a roadmap out of this crisis, then that’s going to be incredibly dangerous for the industry because of the thousands of jobs that are reliant on it.
"So we need to know are these quarantine measures still going to be in place by summer, and can the government give any kind of suggestion of when they will be review because we need to have that detail for the travel industry to function and for thousands of jobs to be protected."
