I'm Felix Salmon and welcome to Axios Recap, where we dig into one big story.

Today is Monday, December the 6th, and we are focused on travel, particularly air travel.

If you were traveling to Israel this holiday season or Japan or Morocco, well, guess what?

You're not.

They have closed their borders to international travelers thanks to the Omicron variant of COVID.

And that's not all that's happening.

On top of the closed borders, travel has been

made more difficult in the UK and many other countries, which are forcing travelers to take

multiple PCR tests, often at great expense. I'm going to have to self-isolate when I go there

while I'm waiting for my test results. Those countries are hard to get to. What's easy to

get to is closer countries, Mexico, Dominican Republic, St. Lucia, places in the Caribbean,

they're seeing a surge in travel because while they were always easier to travel to, now they're

much easier to travel to. They don't have the same kind of restrictions. Domestic travel, that's also

doing well. It's back almost to its pre-pandemic level, at least in coach. Business travel is still

lagging, as you might recall, my colleague Erica Pandy covering on this here show. So after the break,

I'm going to be talking to Axios's Joanne Muller about what all this

means for the airlines. So I'm joined now by Joanne Muller, who covers the future of transportation

here at Axios. Welcome, Joanne. You write the What's Next newsletter, or at least some of it. So you've

been covering a lot of the near-term future of air travel. And I guess my big question is,

does Omicron change things? Or is it just the Israelis being weird and the Japanese being weird?

Well, hi, Felix. Thanks for having me.

Hey, we're in weird times, so everything's weird.

...