What did Brexit do for travel? You may not enjoy finding out

Expensive travel and passport check delays – just some of the things travellers can blame on Brexit, writes Simon Calder

Blue-sky thinking: The UK voted to make travel to locations across the EU, including Santorini, much more difficult and expensive (Simon Calder)

What were you doing on 23 June 2016? Perhaps, like me, voting in the EU referendum.

Seven years ago, the world changed overnight for UK travellers. The consequences are still unravelling.

The most immediate – and lasting – impact was to push up costs for British travellers abroad. When the “Leave” result came in, sterling immediately slumped as international financial markets anticipated the economic damage caused by Brexit.

Against the US dollar, which dictates costs across the airline industry, the pound is currently down 13 per cent compared with the day before the referendum; the cruel arithmetic of reciprocals means aviation fuel or aircraft leases cost 15 per cent more. In the eurozone, that coffee or car rental is about one-eighth more expensive.

If you were among the majority who, as a perfectly respectable political choice, voted successfully to Leave, you helped win these seven changes for British travellers to Europe (and, sometimes, within the UK):

Time limits

Strict limits on the time you can spend in the EU and wider Schengen Area. Take a winter break for the first three months of the year in Spain and you can’t return to anywhere in Schengen until the end of June. You must also prove to EU frontier officials you can afford your stay, and show an onward or return ticket. Also, don‘t bring a cheese or ham sandwich with you (unless you are travelling direct from Northern Ireland to the EU).

Queues

Chaotic scenes at ports never designed to house a hard EU external frontier due to the passport-checking rules we asked to become subject to.

Eurostar cuts

Fewer seats and higher fares on Eurostar, which cannot sell all its tickets because of overcrowding at stations resulting from those extra passport checks. The cross-Channel train firm also blames extra Brexit red tape for ending links from Ebbsfleet, Ashford and Disneyland Paris.

Mobile charges

A return of roaming charges for British mobile phone users in Europe.

Red tape for pets

New rules make it far more difficult and expensive to take a pet abroad, or from Great Britain to Northern Ireland.

Tourism slump

Damaging inbound tourism to the UK by banning more than 200 million EU citizens who have national identity cards but not passports.

Fewer flights

Ending London to Belfast flights by the Irish airline Aer Lingus.

But enough moaning: seven years on is an excellent time to celebrate the majority decision to go it alone. Ministers insist leaving the EU “has given the UK a world of future opportunities”. With the help of the government’s Benefits of Brexit document, I have identified all three of the travel advantages so you don’t have to.

• Duty-free purchases: Cheaper alcohol and tobacco when travelling from the EU to the UK. However, people who like to import large quantities of alcohol will find the limits much lower. While the UK was in European Union, the guideline from HMRC was 90 litres of wine (you could bring back more, but would need to show evidence of, for example, a wedding). That has reduced by four-fifths to 18 litres. The government warns: “If you bring in 19 litres of wine, you must pay tax and duty on all of it because you have gone over your 18 litre allowance for wine.”
• Domestic tourism: Putting up barriers to European workers will “enable UK workers to view the hospitality roles as a rewarding career”.
• Blue passports: Ministers have proudly “reintroduced our iconic blue passports”.

Only a cynic still lamenting losing the democratic vote would point out that any government could have changed the colour of British passports at any time while we were in the EU. For example, Croatia’s passports are as deeply blue as the Adriatic.

Next time you’re sweltering in the non-EU line at Split or Dubrovnik airport, you might catch a glimpse of one as the holder breezes past.