NEWS: St Regis brand coming to London, Thailand changes day 5 test, and Qatar Avios further update

St Regis brand coming to London

Marriott announced today that St Regis would be coming to London in 2023. The hotel will be where the Westbury Mayfair London is now in a great location in the heart of Mayfair, by the luxury shops of Bond Street. The Westbury will receive a £90 million renovation to turn it into the St Regis including adding the eighth floor. 

Here is how the Westbury looks now:

Thailand eases day 5 test rules

If I had £1 for every time Thailand has changed their travel rules, I’d probably have enough to fly there! They seem to just introduce rules that will achieve very little and also put tourists off on a very regular basis before backtracking. You’d think by now they would consult some people with common sense before introducing new rules! Fortunately, they have decided to ease the unpopular decision to introduce a  day 5 test that required quarantine until you received the results. 

You can now take a rapid antigen test on day five and more importantly, these can be self-administered. This means you do not need to make a hotel reservation to take the test. It’s still pretty pointless with omicron as the chances are if you had omicron when you entered that wasn’t picked up you would have been spreading it around Thailand for a couple of days by then!

You still have to have a PCR test when you arrive and wait in a hotel until you get the results that are not too onerous. However, it does have to be a government-approved hotel that you have pre-payed. This is on top of a pre-departure test as well. 

The minimum medical insurance coverage for visitors will also be lowered to $20,000 from $50,000.

The new rules come into force on 1 March 2022. 

Qatar Avios further update

Yesterday I reported that Executive Business Traveller was reporting that Qatar Airways and BA would be increasing the number of Avios seats available to cope with extra demand as Qatar changes QMiles to Avios. Sadly, this has now been confirmed as not correct. Availability will remain the same. Hopefully, BA will start to release more seats outside the guaranteed 4 Club per day as the travel picture stabilises.

In the meantime, Seat Spy or Reward Flight Finder alerts are a great way to find seats. I had been looking for seats to Tenerife for a while and with alerts set up, I managed to get the flights that I wanted after a couple of weeks. 

You can find the official Qatar Avios page here.