Why the Travel Desk is Ending Its Pandemic Tip Sheet

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Hours before President Donald J. Trump blocked nonessential travel from Europe on March 11, 2020, in response to the spiraling coronavirus pandemic, The New York Times’s deputy Travel editor, Elisabeth Goodridge, flew to her home in New York from Brussels, where she had been vacationing with her family. “Countries started shutting down,” Ms. Goodridge remembered.

Ernesto Londoño, then The Times’s bureau chief in Brazil, wrote Ms. Goodridge an email about travel restrictions also taking effect in the Caribbean and South America. Ms. Goodridge asked Mr. Londoño to make a list of the new restrictions and assigned the reporter Aimee Ortiz to cover travel restrictions in other regions, including Europe and Asia. “I have a little PTSD looking back at my Slack from that weekend,” Ms. Goodridge said in a recent interview.

Just three days after the travel ban was announced, the Travel section published “I’m a U.S. Citizen. Where in the World Can I Go?” The master list, which started with changes in 35 countries, outlined not only where American tourists could travel but what restrictions were in place, if any.

“It really just blew up,” Ms. Goodridge said. “So many different countries were shutting down their borders and evolving their rules.”(The State Department released their own list a few days later.)

In the more than two years since it was published, the list has grown to include over 150 countries and has been Travel’s most viewed story since the pandemic started. And on July 1, it will end, signifying a new phase of travel during the coronavirus pandemic.

Keeping track of international tourism restrictions was a team effort. For the past two years, about a dozen reporters contributed to the list, working to update it on a weekly basis. “At the very beginning, it was all hands on deck because things were changing so fast,” said the Travel editor, Amy Virshup. In 2021, the most consistent contributor was the freelance reporter Karen Schwartz; the freelance reporter Paige McClanahan took over in December 2021, and she has been maintaining the list since, from her home in the French Alps.

Ms. McClanahan said that, to update the article, she would go through the list alphabetically, aiming to check 10 to 12 countries every day. She would call or visit the websites of U.S. Embassies, government health and…