Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast from me, Simon Calder, officially a loser.

Yes, seven years ago today on the 23rd of June 2016, I was one of the 48% who voted to remain in the European Union.

The majority, 52% of course, won that vote and they got us to leave.

And well, here we are some years on surveying what's happened since then.

So I wanted to bring you all the benefits

of Brexit that are attributable to tourism and travel. I've looked at them all because I've

gone through the benefits of Brexit book that the government produces and well some would say there's been some

disadvantages as well so maybe I'll take a look at those but first well the joy of having left

the European Union is summed up by the return of duty-free yes even if you're only coming across the Irish Sea from the

Republic to the UK, you are able to very happily get to buy some duty-free stuff. Now, some

people would say this is absolutely fantastic. what could be better than cheaper alcohol and tobacco

well there's a couple of groups who would say that maybe it's not the best thing that's ever

happened to us as a nation partly because of the undoubted harm caused by smoking and drinking, but also if like me,

you like wine, perhaps even more than you like tea, well, unfortunately, we decided to sharply

to reduce the amount of quantities that you could bring back in. So it used to be that

the guideline from HMRC was 90 litres of wine. You could bring back more, but you'd need to show

that, for instance, you were buying it for a wedding or something. That's been reduced to 18 litres.

Still quite a lot, but the government does warn if you bring in 19 litres of wine,

you must pay tax and duty on all of it because you've gone over your 18-liter allowance for

wine. Well, anyway, so the benefit of duty-free. Next, domestic tourism. Now, you might think that the UK has done a pretty good job

of shooting itself in the domestic, in terms of tourism to, or within the UK, we've basically

just said, right, we don't want people from Europe coming here either to work in the tourist industry or to be on holiday

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