By now, we were all hoping that US embassies would have re-opened and travel to the USA would have re-started.

While the UK Government put the USA on its Amber list on May 17th (which means travel is allowed for some work purposes), the US Government has not yet lifted the travel ban on people entering from the UK, Ireland and Schengen Countries. You can see their latest tweet from May 19th here

Despite checking every day, we haven't been told when they will reopen for visa interviews - at present it's expected they won't give a date to re-open until there's also a date for the travel ban to be lifted.

There are reasons to be hopeful however - there's alot going on behind the scenes in the US (and all over the world), and pressure is building on the US Government to open up these programmes as soon as possible.

We know this has been an immensely frustrating year - and for some of you, this is the second year in a row where your programme has been disrupted. We feel this as strongly as you do - all we want right now is to get things up and running again, and to be able to bring you some good news for a change!

Fingers crossed we'll be able to do just that soon.

In the meantime, as always, if you have any questions, just shoot us an email or use the contact form at the bottom of this page.

The IST Plus InfoTeam

Photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash