Is Brexit the end of travel to Europe as we know it?

So as the Brexit discussions grind on and on endlessly and everyone’s resistance to the inanity of it all turns in to frustration a lot of pondering of what and ifs has been happening.

Needless to say political agendas have become brazenly apparent and many (fairly partisan) threats/predictions have been made about what it will entail for people in their normal life.

What would I predict will happen overall? Maybe not a lot either way actually, as businesses, like politicians are very resistant to change to their modus operandi but  even more so, (for both sets of people) they are interested in lining their collective pockets, so they will eventually just make necessary changes to keep things working and therefore make things work in terms of business.

Brexit does leave cruiselines and airlines with some challenges for travel as immigration controls and passport related issues are their day to day bread and butter and obviously it causes a bit of inconvenience for them when how this is processed will change with ANY country. It also obviously causes a problem if one country unilaterally decides to make  problems out of it for political reasons  (but for that I’d suggest seeing the above about pocket lining). Luckily we dont have these problems with most countries around the world when they change visa rules/politics, just our closest neighbours seemingly.

So passport/visa wise do these predicted problems have any precedent in day to day challenges and has a cruise line ever stopped travelling to a country because of this, how hard can adapting be?

So the answer is a resounding yes, YES of course passport and visa changes occur and more regularly than you would think!! China have recently changed their rules on fingerprinting and entry for British citizens which effects both cruising and flights and all of this in a fairly tit for tat Brexit style political stoush.

Have cruiselines decided to move their ships away from China? No of course not, they are putting more and more ships there! Has the sky fallen in!? Negative. Most importantly has there been a foreign office advice to avoid travel to China. Nope.  So the theory that travel to the EU is going to collapse in the bigger picture is based on a load of old tosh if you look at pure practicalities of tourism.

This happens all the time and countries constantly change working and business relationships and in normal situations the travel business can just get on with it.

It is entirely strange that we can have these sort of changes with a country like China, with whom on the face of things we dont have that much in common, yet we find a way to make passport controls work. If we can come to a reciprocal visa and travel agreement with China, surely logic would dictate that we would be able to with our closest neighbours who we share all sorts of bonds with (ignoring anything political) and are also their biggest tourism customer.

So my prediction will be that any disruption to leisure travel to Europe will be at a minimum. If I’m proved wrong it wont be about practicalities it will be about politics.