September 12th - What new travel charges will mean for Northern Ireland
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 12 September 2024
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The new ETA for visitors to the UK could cost Northern Ireland tourism £250m a year. I've been hearing why from Dr Joanne Stuart, chief executive of the Northern Ireland Tourism Alliance.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's Thursday the 12th of September. |
| 0:10.1 | We learned this week that the new Labour government is to be going ahead with the electronic travel |
| 0:18.1 | authorisation project begun by the Conservative Party when it was in government, |
| 0:24.1 | which is going to require everyone who is not a national of the UK or Ireland to have an online |
| 0:33.3 | permit cost £10 when they travel to the UK. Now that's in line with a lot of other countries, |
| 0:43.1 | a lot of blocks such as the European Union, which will be requiring the so-called Etiass from |
| 0:48.9 | sometime next year. But there are some particular problems associated with this which would be affecting |
| 0:56.8 | Northern Ireland tourism more than certainly anywhere in Great Britain. I'm talking today to |
| 1:04.5 | Dr. Joanne Stewart. She is the chief executive of the Northern Ireland Tourism Alliance. |
| 1:12.9 | Dr. Stewart, thank you for joining us. |
| 1:21.0 | Why should we be concerned about a piece of red tape that's, as I was saying, common to many other parts of the world? Why would that be a particularly damaging Northern Ireland? |
| 1:26.2 | The first thing that you've got to appreciate is that Northern Ireland is promoted as a |
| 1:31.2 | destination overseas as part of the island of Ireland destination and has been built very much |
| 1:37.9 | on seamless travel across the island of Ireland. |
| 1:41.8 | What we have on the island, though, is a land border that obviously |
| 1:47.2 | separates the two jurisdictions. So people, and about 70% of our international visitors, |
| 1:54.0 | arrive in Dublin or an airport in the south first, and then as part of their their trip will travel up and include some time in |
| 2:01.8 | Northern Ireland. To do that, they cross the land border into the UK jurisdiction and therefore |
| 2:08.6 | will require an electronic travel authorisation before they travel. Now, the actual system itself |
| 2:17.0 | has been based on people who fly into the UK, who arrive |
| 2:21.6 | by boat or Eurostar, so who are arriving directly into the UK. What hasn't been considered is there |
| 2:28.6 | is a land border where people are crossing and that land border has no immigration control on it. So you are not stopped, |
... |
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