Important: Although some international travel is allowed by the UK government, U.S. government travel restrictions remain in place for travel from the United Kingdom to the United States. Please see below for more details.

Despite everyone hoping embassies would reopen, as of today there is still no news from the US Government as to when travel to the US will be allowed once more nor when the US Embassy in London, the Consulate in Belfast and the embassy in Dublin will start accepting interviews for visas such as the J1.

• For those of you who had start dates in June and July, we are in the process of contacting your Host Companies/ sending back training plans for revised dates. Please check with your US Supervisors and discuss new dates for your internships and traineeships.
• Once your dates have been revised, and your training plan has been signed off by both your US Host Supervisor and you, please make sure you email our team at info@istplus.com to confirm you are hapy to start the process.

We appreciate that no-one can really tell right now when things will open up again, but with the roll out of the vaccines on both sides of the Atlantic (and with very high vaccination rates in the UK), we're still hopeful that there will be an announcement in the coming weeks regarding international travel. Having said that, we also expect that when the embassies open up again, there will be a significant backlog (remember the embassies have been closed since March 2020).

As such, while we are asking Hosts to delay start dates, we can't guarantee we won't be asking them to do this again in the coming weeks. It all depends on when they open up again.

As you can imagine, our teams on both sides of the Atlantic are checking news and updates throughout the day, every day. We're as keen as you are for things to start up.

Please keep checking our new pages as well as the embassy FAQs page for the lastest updates (you can also link to this on the side of this page).

Please also make sure you follow the Consular Section at the US Embassy's Twitter feed for any updates and information.

Many thanks, The IST Plus InfoTeam

Photo by James Kenny on Unsplash