If you're flying to the Continent this summer, the queue at passport control is about to look different, and it's worth knowing why before you're standing in it with two tired children and a flight to catch. The EU's Entry/Exit System — everyone calls it the EES — has finally started rolling out after years of delays, and British travellers are now firmly in the group it affects. It's not a visa, it's not ETIAS (that's the separate thing coming later), and it mostly means your first crossing this year will take longer than you remember.
I've spent the past fortnight untangling what's actually changed versus what the headlines made it sound like, because the gap between the two is wide. The short version: nobody is being turned away for having a UK passport, but the old habit of breezing through with a quick stamp is over.
What the EES actually does
Since the system began phasing in, non-EU visitors — which now includes us, post-Brexit — get registered electronically the first time they enter the Schengen area. Instead of an officer stamping your passport, you give four fingerprints and a facial scan at a kiosk or to a border guard. That biometric record then sits on file for three years, so on later trips the crossing is meant to be quicker because the data's already there.
The catch is the first time. Registration takes a couple of minutes per person, and at a busy airport like Faro or Alicante in late June, that adds up fast across a planeload of holidaymakers. The honest advice from anyone who's been through it recently: build in more time, and don't book the tightest possible connection through a Schengen hub on your outbound leg.
The 90-in-180 rule still trips people up
None of this changes the rule that already bites British travellers, and the EES actually makes it easier to enforce. You can spend 90 days in any rolling 180-day period across the Schengen area without a visa — and that's cumulative across all those countries, not 90 days per country. People with a place in the Algarve or a bolthole in Tuscany are the ones who get caught out, because a fortnight here and a long weekend there quietly eats the allowance.
- The 180 days is a rolling window, not a calendar reset — work backwards from today, not from January.
- The EU runs an online calculator; use it before you book if you've already travelled this year.
- Overstaying, even by a few days, can mean an entry ban — and now the system logs your exact dates automatically.
If you're a normal once-or-twice-a-year holidaymaker, you'll never get near the limit. If you're retired and spend half your life on the Costa del Sol, you genuinely need to count.
Where to actually go in late June
Peak July and August prices haven't fully landed yet, which makes the back end of June one of the best-value windows of the year. The Mediterranean is hot but not yet the furnace it becomes in August, and the crowds are thinner.
For sheer value, southern Spain and Portugal are hard to beat right now. A week's self-catering in the Algarve outside the Albufeira strip — somewhere like Tavira or Lagos — runs noticeably cheaper than the same week in August, and the sea's warm enough to swim without that first-dip gasp. Croatia's Dalmatian coast is the other strong shout: Split and the islands off it are gorgeous in June, before the August cruise-ship crush turns the old town into a slow shuffle.
My genuinely unfashionable recommendation, though, is to look north rather than south. The Scottish islands and the Norwegian fjords are at their absolute best in late June, with daylight stretching past eleven at night and prices that don't carry the Mediterranean premium. A few days on Skye or around Bergen is a different kind of summer holiday, and you won't spend it hiding from a 40-degree afternoon. The trade-off is obvious — you might get rain, and you're not coming back with a tan.
Booking sense that saves real money
A handful of habits make a bigger difference than any single deal site:
- Fly mid-week. A Tuesday or Wednesday departure out of a regional airport like Bristol or Leeds Bradford is routinely cheaper than the Friday-night Gatwick scrum, and quieter too.
- Check the train for anything within reach. The Eurostar to Paris or Brussels, then onward, can beat flying once you factor in the airport faff — and it lands you in the city centre, not an hour out.
- Book accommodation direct where you can. Many smaller Portuguese and Italian guesthouses give a better rate by email than through Booking.com, because they're not paying the platform's cut.
- Don't pre-pay for airport parking at the gate price — Manchester and Stansted both cost a fortune on the day, but a fraction booked a week ahead.
Beating the heat without booking the dearest week
One thing the southern-Europe brochures gloss over is just how punishing the afternoons have become. Last summer parts of Spain, Italy and Greece sat under amber and red heat warnings for days at a stretch, with cities like Seville and Athens pushing past 40 degrees. It doesn't have to spoil a trip, but it does change how you plan one. The Spanish and Italians have known this forever — they don't fight the midday sun, they hide from it.
Build the day around the heat rather than ignoring it. Be out early, retreat indoors or to the shade between roughly one and five, and come back out in the evening when the streets refill and everything's pleasant again. Air-conditioned accommodation stops being a luxury and becomes the thing you check first; a charming hilltop apartment with no aircon and west-facing windows is a sweatbox you'll resent by day three. Pack a refillable water bottle, because a café charging three euros for a small bottle of water adds up faster than you'd think, and most Italian towns have free public fountains running cold all day.
If the heat genuinely worries you — travelling with a baby, an older relative, or a medical condition that the sun makes worse — that's a real reason to look at the cooler options rather than tough it out. Brittany, the Dutch coast, the Lake District and Ireland all give you a proper summer break without the health risk, and they're rarely booked solid the way the Med is.
The boring bits that ruin holidays
Travel insurance is the one nobody wants to talk about and everybody regrets skipping. A GHIC card — the replacement for the old EHIC — gets you state healthcare in the EU on the same terms as locals, and it's free from the official NHS site. Be careful here: search "GHIC" and you'll hit copycat sites charging £35 for something that costs nothing. The card covers state treatment, but it won't fly you home or cover a private clinic, which is exactly what proper insurance is for.
Check your passport's expiry date now, not the night before. For most of Europe a UK passport needs to be less than ten years old on the day you travel and have at least three months left after your planned return. People get refused boarding over this every single week, and the airline won't refund you — it's on you to check.
One last thing that's easy to forget in the rush: tell your bank you're travelling, or use a card with no foreign-transaction fees. Cards like Chase or a Monzo account dodge the 3% loading that high-street debit cards quietly add to every coffee and taxi. On a week away that's the difference between a few quid and the price of a decent dinner — and dinner's the better use of it.