To think we might not be going on holiday next April after all?

[Hoardernomore]

We stupidly booked a holiday to France for about a fortnight after Brexit. I didn’t even consider brexit at the time, I just considered ds’s Easter holidays. It’s to Disneyland Paris and we’ve been waiting to take the children for ages. We’ve only paid the deposit on the hotel (stopping in Disneyland hotel so expensive if we end up not being able to go) but have paid for the flights.

We are idiots.

Would we be best to cut our losses and not pay the balance on the hotel and book for another time?

For those saying that we will all be stuck in the U.K., that is absolutely ridiculous. There will be nothing preventing us from flying West. Just book a holiday to the USA, Canada etc and you will be fine.

Another one who can’t read.

The resolution was to use the full date in computer programmes and not abbreviate it!!

Yes. It had to be changed everywhere and it was a big job that took a lot of work from a lot of people.

Brexit is similar in many ways. Lots of work is required by a lot of people and if they fuck it up there will be negative consequences.

The difference with Brexit is that it involves reaching an agreement, as though you had to get hundreds of people to agree whether to write the date as 2018-10-05 or 05/10/2018 or 10/05/2018 before you could start changing the computer code.

If they don't agree it will go wrong. So far they have had difficulty agreeing. It's understandable people will be a bit nervous.

If there are any flights or ferries in the days after Brexit, they need to be dedicated to medicine and food. I have a close relative who will not live more than a few days without medicine imported from the EU.

People need to stop moaning about holidays and think about the important issues.

@user1467536289 - Does anyone remember the Millenium Bug Y2K? The resolution was to use the full date in computer programmes and not abbreviate it!! We all woke up on 1st January 2000 and guess what?? The computer's worked

And how exactly do you think all those millions of dates contained in existing computer systems were converted to full format by Jan 1st, 2000? It wasn't by repeatedly stating that they would have to become full dates because it would cost too much otherwise and that would be in nobody's best interest.

Work started years in advance. Work took years to complete. It was completed in time as the problem was anticipated, a solution was designed and then implemented.

Unfortunately, I don't see the same happening with brexit.

One of the reasons that the Y2k bug didn't cause meltdown and disaster is that most companies employed highly skilled and expensive technical resource months in advance to stop any issues.

Here we are 6 months in advance of the date and no advance preparations can be made as no one knows what the way forward will look like.

If a new visa needs to be created then that feels to me like more than 6 months effort to recruit the team you need to do the work, determine what your actual requirements are and then implement it, and that's probably without an online method of completion. Plus how will other EU countries acknowledge the visa?

The likelihood is that something will be cobbled together that either defers or avoids the need for a visa. But at the rate it's going at because Theresa needs to learn an amusing dance routine for the conference and everyone is waiting for Boris to self implode I wouldn't be travelling in Europe the first two weeks after Brexit goes live.

When we went to Florida we had to apply for ESTA's on the plane, I can't see it being any more difficult than that to get into France.

European politicians and businesses have repeatedly stated that the integrity of the EU outweighs any losses incurred by the UK's withdrawal

Not quite right. EU politicians have certainly said this, I don’t think you’d find many businesses who would agree!

@TonTonMacoute - and you think that businesses will be able to ignore the law just because they want British business?

Talkstotrees. I take it you read the Guardian then and believe everything in it.

Glmcall123 - and how long do you think is the lead time to get a system like ESTAs in place ? I presume all the European countries would need to agree what information to collect and if there was going to be a fee and how much it would be. Plus if there was a fee, build a mechanism to collect the money and then determine what it would be used for.

It's all totally possible to do with enough time and effort thrown at it, and I'm sure once it's in place it will not be too much of a faff, but at the minute, I can't see how it will work on Day 1 or indeed Day 1-90.

Just book a holiday to the USA, Canada etc and you will be fine.

I don’t want to spend the rest of my life holidaying in the US or Canada. I love Europe. I am pretty fucked off to be leaving.

Maybe there will be a time scale to roll out the new system, so that eu travel is allowed until 2020 for instance. That would resolve immediate issues and give time to set up whatever systems they decide to roll out.

Anyone else think if you tap on the heads of Brexiteers then you'll hear an echo?

Aha! This is quite reassuring OP. Your passport just needs to meet regulations!

www.gov.uk/guidance/passport-rules-for-travel-to-europe-after-brexit#rules-for-passports

When we went to Florida we had to apply for ESTA's on the plane

No you didn’t. ESTAs have to be in place before you board the plane.

You might have completed a landing card but you didn’t complete an ESTA.

"rookiemere
One of the reasons that the Y2k bug didn't cause meltdown and disaster is that most companies employed highly skilled and expensive technical resource months in advance to stop any issues."

Did they though??

It identifies two problems that may exist in many computer programs. First, the practice of representing the year with two digits became problematic with logical error(s) arising upon "rollover" from xx99 to xx00. This had caused some date-related processing to operate incorrectly for dates and times on and after 1 January 2000, and on other critical dates which were billed "event horizons". Without corrective action, long-working systems would break down when the "... 97, 98, 99, 00 ..." ascending numbering assumption suddenly became invalid.
Secondly, some programmers had misunderstood the Gregorian calendar rule that determines whether years that are exactly divisible by 100 are not leap years, and assumed the year 2000 would not be a leap year. Years divisible by 100 are not leap years, except for years that are divisible by 400. Thus the year 2000 was a leap year.
"Companies and organisations worldwide checked, fixed, and upgraded their computer systems to address the anticipated problem.[2]"
Very few computer failures were reported when the clocks rolled over into 2000.
Which confirms that it was - as we know it now - a simple 'fix'. Most Organisations own IT Departments were on top of the situation and did not "employ highly skilled and expensive technical resource months in advance to stop any issues".
I worked for a highly technical and major consumer electronics goods player at the time and our own department requested information and applied the detail to our systems. No failures, no outages and not Y2K crash.

Oh but the Exit from the EU was just a computer fix........However - we are not suddenly going to be alienated from the rest of the EU or the world - so why would you say that we will???

Can you not change the flights for an admin fee and ask to change the date with the hotel i don't think you would loose your deposit then. If school holidays allow you could try and go before Brexit happens or you could postpone until a couple of months after giving you time to sort paperwork if necessary?

After 29th March, if there is a No Deal Brexit, British citizens might well have to apply for a visa. There is no system in place that can cope with 18 million applications between 30th March and the summer holidays, so your 2-week turnaround time will be very optimistic.

I think it’s doable, the system is already in place, when you apply for visa you’ll be applying to that country’s embassy which already deals with millions of other nations’ applications. yes it will increase their workload but not everybody is going to the same eu country are they? applications will be distributed between them, some will be france some will be italy some will be greece... it’s not a huge increase and can be handled. i think :)

i think brexit was a very silly decision for uk and it will have some serious outcomes, but i don’t think travelling will be one of them. it will be just a tad more difficult that’s all, you are overthinking only because it was so easy before.

And an ESTA is not a visa. It’s an advance electronic authorisation to travel under the visa waiver scheme.

There will be nothing preventing us from flying West. Just book a holiday to the USA, Canada etc and you will be fine.

And you'd be wrong. Open Skies covers flights to the US and Canada, and many other places as well; not just the EU.

Read the EU and UK Govt. papers and you'll discover that UK-registered planes, pilots, aircrew, ground crew and airports all lose their certifications in the event of there being No Deal. No certifications means no flights. It also means no insurance, which again means no flights.

IF there is no deal and free movement is gone forever, then I have to think with a bit of optimism.

I think travel to EU countries operate similar to places like Bosnia and Serbia and Albania etc. Visa free entry for 90 days and passport stamped on entry and exit.

Different queue for UK passport holders of course, but I don't see it as anything more than the above system. But there was talk of a visa fee or something? I don't know why that should be the case if there is no current visa fee for the countries I mentioned above that are in Europe but not in the EU.

I voted remain just to mention.

@user1467536289 - we are not suddenly going to be alienated from the rest of the EU or the world - so why would you say that we will???

Nobody is saying Britain will be alienated from the rest of the world. However, even with the best will in the world, deals need to be done in order to facilitate trade and travel. That takes time. A no deal brexit is just that - brexit without any deals. There will be an intervening period between the exit and the deals being struck.

The millennium bug required a lot of work to ensure there were no problems. The work was done either in-house or by hiring consultants, depending on the system and what was required.

Brexit requires a lot of work to ensure there are no problems. I don't see much sign of that at the moment.

I think it’s doable, the system is already in place, when you apply for visa you’ll be applying to that country’s embassy which already deals with millions of other nations’ applications. yes it will increase their workload but not everybody is going to the same eu country are they? applications will be distributed between them, some will be france some will be italy some will be greece... it’s not a huge increase and can be handled. i think

There is no system already in place and no personnel available.

I doubt that the Spanish Embassy does have the capacity to cope with anything up to 10 million applications a year. The French cannot process 4-5 million, Greece maybe 2 million and so on. All largely between 30th March and 1st July for the summer season.

It is a huge increase - at the moment, the London embassies handle very few, if any, EU visa applications. Travellers from non-EU countries are supposed to apply in their home countries before arriving in Europe, even if their first European destination is the UK.

I'll bite - your detail suggests some fringe involvement but thats obviously all - yes some organisations had systems that were amenable to straightforward fixes. However beforehand every important system had to be checked and tested to make sure it would be ok - in many cases the testing was not possible and deep (expensive) analysis was needed. you clearly never saw that.
The huge range of ancient systems in most multinationals made fixes and subsequent data migration and testing impossible - it being simpler to migrate to new systems - this was in the days when sap implementations were year long activities employing extremely expensive resources simply because of the worldwide demand - i personally was involved in two multi-million dollar global rollouts solely to fix identified y2k issues.

There are non EU countries who are part of the Open Skies agreement, so no reason why the UK couldn't be too.

The level of mind-numbing ignorance on this thread is actually, physically, painful.

Ideologically-rabid Brexiteers are one thing. MIndless idiots who just go, Oh, it'll be fiiiine, we're British are quite another.

Fuck me. It appears the country is screwed in more ways than I ever imagined.