Porting this over from the Speculation Thread:
There aren't any quarantine requirements for Switzerland, Italy, France, and Greece, but it's a longer gap than we're used to:
Arrival in Zurich: 17 Sep 1:20pm
Departure from Milan: 22 Sep 11:09am (spending 4 days 22h on land)
Arrival in Bastia: 22 Sep 12:02pm
Departure from Figari: 26 Sep 9:38am (spending 3 days 21h on land)
As a reference, last season we had: Trinidad and Tobago (~1.5 days on land), Bogota (~1.5 days), Manaus (~2.5 days), Asuncion (~2 days), Paris+Berlin (~5 days), Almaty (~2.5 days), Hyderabad (~1.5 days), Siem Reap (~1.5 days), Manila (~1 day).
I wonder if we could have fit in two legs between Switzerland and Italy, or even on Corsica for that matter?
It doesn't make sense for teams to be on the ground for so long, especially since there are no quarantine requirements in any of the countries they've visited so far. Even if they did a test upon arrival at every location they arrived in, the results should be out within 24h. Furthermore, express tests are available with results out within the hour; while these are more expensive, they are more than compensated for by the time and wages saved.
Unless production is allocating a massive amount of buffer time in case something goes wrong, my gut feel is that we've been having double legs in each location, to minimise travel and maximise the use of travel-friendly locations (i.e. not the Asia-Pacific, where most borders remain closed). We could be looking at The Amazing (Mostly) European Race:
Leg 1: London
Leg 2: Glasgow
Leg 3: Somewhere in the UK
Leg 4: Switzerland
Switzerland
Leg 5: Milan
Leg 6: Bastia
Leg 7: Bonifacio
Leg 8 (and 9?): Thessaloniki
Come to think of it, it's very unusual for three consecutive legs in the UK (the only precedent was China in TAR 14). Could it have been a substitute for an Italy leg that was cut during the first European wave of COVID-19, back in early 2020?
This really shouldn’t be discussed in the Timeline and Summary thread, either, so I’m importing it back to the discussion thread.
But if there were two legs filmed in each of these four locations, we’d have enough for a 12 or 13 leg season with surviving final three teams headed back somewhere in the U.S. for the final city, or with a break in precedent, a final city outside the U.S.:
4 - Switzerland
5 - Switzerland
6 - Milan
7 - Milan
8 - Bastia
9 - Bastia
10 - Bonifacio
11 - Bonifacio
12 - Thessaloniki
13 - Thessaloniki (back to U.S.?)
That becomes a whole lot simpler, they get the dry run for a more normal season 34, in a pandemic or post-pandemic world.
And it does solve the problem of travel to regions of the world not yet reopened in a way that works best for TAR.
