Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's Tuesday the 4th of June and I'm going to have a bit of a rant. Do forgive me but I get very, very exercised when Britain's fantastic travel industry, which mainly delivers wonderful experiences

at very good value and extremely safely, starts letting down its customers. And I'm afraid

Britain's biggest budget airline, EasyJet, has been doing rather too much of that.

It's over one particular issue, and that is the post-Brexit passport expiry rules that we chose to accept after voting to leave the European Union.

I'll tell you what those rules are and that I hope will allow you to make sure that you don't

fall foul of, well, having your passport genuinely out of date, although as you'll hear, there's not much

I can do if you are told it is out of date when it isn't.

So has your passport had its 10th birthday?

No.

Well, that's one condition met.

On the day you plan to leave, will it have at least three months left before the expiry

date printed on the passport?

Yes, you're good to go. And by the way, when I said the expiry date printed on the passport,

that was deliberate because there is so much nonsense around, including, I'm afraid,

nonsense perpetrated by travel agents and by some travel

journalists saying oh no your passport expires after nine years nine months no it

doesn't and please ignore anything you see to that effect in fact don't ignore it

tell me about it anyway those are the rules.

And yeah, you've got to get your head around them.

And I've been getting my head around them for months, years, since they took effect.

And if you are practiced at this, then in about one minute, you can look at the intended travel dates of a passenger,

you can look at their passport, issue and expiry dates, and then you can say,

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