Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder, and things are getting weird on the European front once again.

Nothing to do with the Northern Ireland Protocol, which by the way, at the moment, doesn't allow you to take cheese and ham sandwiches from Great Britain to Northern Ireland,

but maybe that will be dealt with elsewhere today.

No, this is about the news which I was going to say has kind of leaked out,

which is I regularly trawl the European Union site, maybe I should get out more,

for news about Etias, the online Euro visa, and suddenly it's been postponed to 2024.

Yes, it has.

So, just a brief reminder about what this is all about. So the electronic travel

information and authorisation system, also known as Etias, has been under development for, well,

the last seven years, at least, the UK, which you might remember used to be in the

European Union, was involved in developing it. The whole idea is that this kind of mimics

the Ester scheme that the US has had in place for many years. It's an online visa. Well, they say,

it's not a visa. It's a, it's a thing, but not a visa it's a it's a thing but not a visa well you you um

the effect is exactly the same you have to go online you have to pay money um seven euros that's about

six pounds for a permit value for up to three years you have to give all sorts of information in

advance and it was due to start in

2021. Now, there's all kinds of problems. Yes, COVID, of course, has been a complete pain

in terms of getting things implemented. But actually, there's a big problem, which is that

bluntly, ETS depends on another kind of wider system called the

entry-exit scheme, or entry-exit system, to be precise, that's the EES. And that requires every so-called

third country national. And that's, that's, we, we asked to be, um, third country nationals.

Um, they have to have fingerprints and facial biometrics checked on arrival and departure.

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