Omicron upsets travel plans of many in city

By Kumaran P | NT

Bengaluru: Many Bengalureans who had gone out of town for holidays and work-related travel, before the Omicron variant was first detected in the city, are now in a fix. A lot of people are also cancelling their upcoming travel plans.

Many corporate firms who had sent their employees on work related tours are stuck in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai as the authorities have tightened norms at the airports.

Sameer, a businessman said, “We are all in Kashmir on a holiday and Omicron is in Bengaluru. We are so worried about coming to the airport and traveling back. We know the testing is done only for international passengers, but domestic passengers are also not safe. We are deciding to cut short out holiday and head back after taking an RT-PCR from Kashmir.” “We did not want to take risks and have been postponing our work travel for a long time. We just planned for a two-week tour for our colleagues from Delhi to Kolkata. They are at the work site and within two days an Omicron announcement was made. Despite following Covid Appropriate Behaviour (CAB) strictly, there is always this scare about the pandemic that is looming for quite some time now and this announcement has put all of us in a fix,” said Aditi Nair, a techie.

Another professional said, “Our entire team had made work plans to Kolkata and North Eastern States. We were on our work tour and it is so confusing on our return flights to Bengaluru. We are more worried about the last-minute restrictions which will be put in place.”

Not just that, many corporate firms have a leave policy of providing maximum leaves in the month of December and travel plans are also cancelled. Murthy R, another techie said, “My family and I never miss vacation during the month of December. Our previous two Decembers have gone down the drain due to the pandemic and we thought we could just take some precautionary measures this time, but with Omicron getting reported in the State and in Delhi on Sunday, we had to postpone all the travel to next six months.”

Interestingly, on Sunday an Omicron case was reported in Delhi and many passengers taking connecting flights via Delhi are worried. Rohith Rao said, “My flight from Dibrugarh to Bengaluru has a connecting flight at Delhi with a layover of three hours. This is now putting us in a mess if we will be put under restrictions because our connecting flight is from Delhi.”