Covid restrictions five years on: How the pandemic brought the world’s leading travel industry to its knees

Testing times: London Heathrow Terminal 5 at the height of the Covid pandemic - (Simon Calder)

On 17 March 2020, the foreign secretary at the time, Dominic Raab, told British travellers to stay at home. “I approved the FCO's first-ever global travel advisory which advised against all but essential international travel,” he later told the UK Covid-19 Inquiry.

As what was then known as the “Wuhan coronavirus” spread around the world, the effect was to suspend all outbound package holidays, and to invalidate standard travel insurance policies for independent travellers.