Visas, travel abroad and Britons overseas

Brexit has reshaped UK travel in three concrete ways: passport, healthcare, and time. The passport now needs at least six months remaining validity for Schengen entry, and renewal queues at HMPO peak every spring before the summer rush — every season produces stories of travellers turned away at Stansted for an out-of-date passport. EHIC has been replaced by the Global Health Insurance Card (GHIC), still free to apply through the NHS, still useful for emergency state-provided care in the EU, but no longer a substitute for proper travel insurance. And time: the 90-days-in-180-days Schengen limit now binds British travellers as much as Americans or Canadians. Second-home owners on the Costa del Sol, in Provence and in the Algarve discovered the new arithmetic the hard way; many have moved to long-stay national visas. ETIAS will add an authorisation step once it launches.

British domestic travel — staycations as the post-pandemic vocabulary settled it — runs heavily through the Scottish Highlands (Edinburgh, Skye, Loch Ness, the West Highland Line), the Lake District (Windermere, Keswick, the fells), Cornwall (St Ives, Padstow, the Cornish coast paths), Wales (Snowdonia, Pembrokeshire, the Brecon Beacons), the Yorkshire Dales and Moors, and Northern Ireland (Belfast, the Causeway Coast). London still pulls weekend traffic from across the country for theatre, museums and shopping; Edinburgh's August Festival peaks the Scottish summer; and the Cornish school-holiday compression means booking from January for August accommodation in St Ives is normal. Half-term weeks, bank holidays and the late-July to early-September school summer drive sell-outs at the popular ends of every region.

Spain is by an enormous margin the single largest UK outbound destination — well over 15 million British visits per year in normal seasons, concentrated on the Costa del Sol, Costa Blanca, the Balearics (Mallorca, Menorca, Ibiza) and the Canaries (Tenerife, Gran Canaria, Lanzarote, Fuerteventura). Around half a million Britons live in Spain, mostly retired or part-year residents — a community that pre-dates Brexit by decades and continues to define a particular kind of UK expatriate culture. France follows (the Channel-crossing, Provence, Côte d'Azur, Alps for winter sports), then Italy (Rome, Tuscany, Amalfi, the lakes), Greece (the islands more than Athens), Portugal (Lisbon, Porto, Algarve), and Turkey (Antalya, Bodrum) — all visa-free within Schengen's 90/180-day rule, all heavily flown from every UK regional airport.

Beyond Mediterranean Europe, British outbound runs along corridors no other European market shares. The US (Florida for families, New York for shopping, California for the West Coast circuit) leads long-haul, with around 4–5 million British visits per year. The Caribbean follows — Jamaica, Barbados, St Lucia, Antigua and the Cayman Islands all retain Commonwealth ties and direct UK flights. India is the third long-haul pillar, with deep Commonwealth and family-visit ties for British Indian heritage; Goa and Kerala draw winter beach travellers, Mumbai and Delhi the business corridor. Australia and New Zealand absorb the ancestry-visa stream and the gap-year tradition. South Africa, Thailand, Indonesia (Bali), the UAE (Dubai stopovers), Singapore and increasingly China complete the picture — and the new Chinese visa-free regime opens up a corridor that had become almost impractical for casual UK leisure travel.