TRAVEL OVERSEAS IS NOT GETTING EASIER And a passport is no longer enough By Milan Korcok In 2024, Canadians made more than seven million trips to Europe and the UK*, more than in pre-pandemic 2019 and, judging by the countries visited, the vast majority needed nothing more than their passports to meet most border requirements. But jump a year to 2025 and travellers had better prepare for a new wave of requirements, border-entry procedures and a better-than-average knowledge of “biometric” technologies to supplement their dog-eared old passports if travelling overseas. *Statistics Canada data Sure, we’ll always need passports, but who wants to wait in a seemingly endless line for a customs officer with a stamp, when the flip of an iPhone can reveal your whole genealogy. It’s clear that protecting healthy tourism from abuse is a top priority in more and more nations. That’s a given. But the proliferation of acronyms such as ETIAS, EES, ETA (common in the travel trade) needs some investigation by the folks paying the tab – you. Let’s start with EES – the long-awaited and much delayed Entry/Exit System for travellers bound for countries within Europe’s Schengen Community. That’s a top overseas target for Canadian travellers. To date, Canadians have not needed visas to travel to and within the Schengen countries of Europe. And this won’t change. But they will be required to apply for entry – a process that’s still evolving and changing as we speak. Stage one (at this point) is that upon arrival in their country of choice, travellers will be confronted by self-service kiosks where border control officers may assist them in facilitating biometric facial, fingerprint, passport, entry and exit data which can be accessed for any subsequent travel wherever they wish throughout the broader community within the next three years – when they will have to do it all over again. Purportedly, it’s more convenient than waiting for a customs officer to stamp visas by hand. At present, the system is not fully functional among all 29 countries, or even within many of them, so there’s no charge for the service. 24 | www.snowbirds.org Travel
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