Yahoo News 
Passport queue times for EU tourists entering the UK 'will nearly double' after Brexit
Tourists from the EU are set to face lengthy passport queues to enter the UK after Brexit, according to a leading travel expert.
Current Border Force objectives are for UK/EU nationals to undergo a “soft check”, meaning 90% of people are processed within 25 minutes.
However, the “hard check” non-EU channel, that could be used by EU nationals after Brexit, would mean 90% of people are processed within 45 minutes – nearly doubling the waiting time for visitors.
Tourism Alliance director Kurt Janson said that standing in a queue for this long “is not going to encourage you to come here” – potentially putting the tourism industry at risk.
He told Yahoo News UK: “It’s worth bearing in mind that about 67% of visitors to the UK are from the EU, so this is 20m people per annum that Border Force would have to process through the hard check channel.
“We simply don’t think that this is feasible within the constraints of airport immigration halls at airports.”
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In a House of Lords report to the European Union Committee, Mr Janson also warned that unless measures were taken to facilitate the movement of EU visitors to the UK, costs would go up – which would have devastating effects on UK tourism and jobs.
Citing a major study he conducted, Mr Janson said that a 1% change in the cost of coming to the UK would see a drop of 1.3% in revenue for it.
By these calculations, if costs were to go up by just 10%, tourism revenue from Europe would drop by £1.3bn per annum and cost 24,000 jobs.
He added to Yahoo News UK: “What I was saying was not a estimate or prediction – it was more a warning that it doesn’t take much in terms of a change in cost to have a significant impact on the amount of revenue we gain from tourism and the level of employment in the industry.”
The Tourism Alliance said leaving the EU without bespoke measures in place to facilitate the movement of EU visitors would “have a very considerable detrimental impact on the UK tourism industry”.
Top pic: Rex
