Escape from zero covid strategy
Hong Kongers charter private jets for their pets
01/20/2022, 2:27 p.m
Hong Kong’s zero-Covid strategy leads to rising freight prices and flight cancellations. As a result, more and more people are paying large sums for chartered flights to get themselves and their pets out of the city. The demand for private jets is increasing.
A zero-Covid policy and strict entry regulations are turning Hong Kong into an increasingly isolated city. Residents who want to leave the Chinese special administrative region with their pets, for example because of strict quarantine rules, face a problem: the pandemic restrictions are reducing cargo space on commercial flights. Those who can afford it are now chartering private jets. Owners will have to pay around $25,500 for themselves and the pet, according to the Financial Times newspaper.
“The demand is huge,” the newspaper quoted Chris Phillips, Air Charter Service’s manager of pet and medical charters. “People want to bring their pets back to their home countries, their cats, their dogs and their rabbits, and they just can’t bring them back through commercial routes.
At the beginning of the year, Hong Kong imposed a landing ban on planes from eight countries with massively increasing numbers of infections, such as the USA and Great Britain. This has resulted in a number of flight cancellations as airlines struggle to comply with ever-changing regulations. “There’s this new kind of jet pooling where people get together and try to find a date where they’re like, ‘Fine, we’re flying that day,'” says Air Charter Service’s Philips.
Hong Kong’s efforts to eradicate the virus have long since extended to pets themselves: in the wake of a corona outbreak, the authorities just this week ordered the killing of around 2,000 hamsters and other small animals. According to media reports, this was preceded by the case of a pet shop owner who had been diagnosed with the first infection with the Delta variant in Hong Kong for a good three months.
Hamster culling as a precaution
As the Hong Kong newspaper “South China Morning Post” reported, shops and hamster keepers were asked to have their animals put to sleep. The authorities admitted that there was no evidence to date that pets transmitted Sars-CoV-2 to humans – but they wanted to exercise caution.
The figures from the Hong Kong-based company Pet Holidays also show that the fear for pets is increasing the demand for private jets. While the company didn’t record any orders in 2020, customers have booked 18 private jets for pet translocations over the past year. The company expects to charter another 20 private jets for pets this year. About a third of customers will switch from commercial flights to chartered services.
A similar development is reported by Top Stars Air, a business aircraft distributor. Last year, the company brokered only dozens of flights. Today, according to information from the Financial Times, it receives about 20 inquiries per day. A flight to London for six people and seven pets is planned for the next month.