Travel expert Eoghan Corry says a number of stumbling blocks have hampered the European Union's traffic light travel system.
The system rates EU countries as green, orange or red depending on the number of COVID-19 cases per 100,000 of the population, the positivity rate and the number of tests carried out.
EU member states have agreed to sign up to the new system for international travel.
But Eoghan told Pat Kenny there are already problems with alignment.
"It's not quite clear how aligned we are.
"Hildegarde Naughton said last week before the Oireachtas Committee that it looks like we are going to start treating amber countries or orange countries as the same as red countries.
"It's also not clear [if] we're going to adopt it by region - that would be important, for instance, for the likes of the Canary Islands being stripped away from mainland Spain.
"It's also not clear if we're taking the metric of 4% positives, which is one of the metrics that went before the commission.
"It does look like we have said we're aligning with the EU policy, and only taking a little bit of it.
"This is complicated a bit by the fact that the EU policy that went before the ministers, and went into that room, isn't the same as came out.
"What went to the Council of Ministers from the Secretariat was that states would give two weeks notice of a change in policy.
"When it came back out from the room with the ministers, it said 24 hours.
"That means nobody can plan a trip and no airline can plan a schedule.
"It also gives a huge degree of opting out to the member states."
'Travel vacuum'
"What the European Union are trying to do is try and prevent all 27 member countries all going their own way on COVID policy.
"Because as we know, when we're fighting this invisible enemy which has caused such havoc in our personal and health lives - and caused so many fatalities since March - countries tend to bunch up and try and go their own way and occasionally blame the neighbours, all of that sort of thing.
"The EU is sitting presiding over this, watching this, and saying 'Lets not allow to happen what happened last March when we face a new crisis'.
On the issue of mass testing at airports, Eoghan says: "To sum it up in one line: the industry, airlines, airports, everybody wants this, passengers want it.
"The health professionals are not convinced".
"What will happen next week - and we heard from [daa CEO] Dalton Philips and the two airlines yesterday - all saying 'Testing, we're ready to go'.
"Dublin Airport have three providers, lined up, to provide this testing from November 8th.
"That's a key date because that's when the Government will come back with exactly how aligned we are to the EU policy.
"The medical people from what we hear - and [CMO] Tony Holohan will be before the same committee next week - are really saying that antigen doesn't have their confidence."
He said while this was "probably an extreme way of putting it", issues such as the number of tests required and the number of false-positives are potentially seen as a problem.
"That I think is where our problems began in March and have developed over the summer.
"The medical professionals just see anything generated be international travel - there aren't being an awful lot of new infections - but anything generated as something they can do without.
"The pressure they've put on politicians has led to this sort of vacuum of travel".
