Paraguay Resumes Regular International Flights

The Paraguayan government confirmed this Friday that as of October 21 it will once again allow regular international flights through «Silvio Pettirossi International Airport» in Asunción and «Guaraní International Airport» in Ciudad del Este, putting an end to more than seven months of inactivity.

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The entry of both Paraguayan citizens, resident foreigners and non-resident foreigners will be allowed, although meeting a series of quite draconian requirements compared to those established by other countries in the region, so that from the local commercial aviation industry they criticized that this hardly helps to a recovery of the demand.

In statements made to the newspaper ABC Color de Asunción, the president of the Board of Representatives of International Airlines in Paraguay (JURCAIP), said that “Opening the airport with a mandatory quarantine condition for the arriving passenger is not commercially viable for us. No passenger will travel to Paraguay ».

Those who enter Paraguayan territory must quarantine for 14 days at home (or in specific  hotels), but those who present a certificate with a negative PCR test result for COVID-19 performed within 72 hours prior to the flight can reduce the isolation time to a week, but they will only be able to leave after a second negative test.

This week it was announced that a laboratory would be installed at Silvio Pettirossi airport that would carry out rapid tests.

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Non-resident foreigners in Paraguay must also have international medical insurance coverage that includes care for COVID-19 and laboratory tests.

Air Europa manager for Bolivia and Paraguay, Olavi Linkola, told the same newspaper that «we are hardly going to go through two flights a month with these types of restrictions, we cannot call that recovery. They want to make us operate as when we operated as humanitarian flights. Neither the travel agencies nor the hotels will be reactivated, because the number of passengers will be minimal».

Along with Argentina and Venezuela, Paraguay was the only South American country that did not have regular international flights restored or with a certain date for it.