Brexit. EU tourist hot spots will now be affordable

Travelling to Ibiza and Mallorca in Spain, Tuscany in Italy and Provence in France will soon be more affordable for Indians,

These favourite tourist spots, especially Spain where close to 10 million British citizens travel each summer, will now look to woo travellers from across the globe. Britons are likely to cut back on their travel budgets with tough times ahead for their economy.

According to Bloomberg, a survey conducted by the travel booking site Travel Zoo also found that one in three Europeans would be less inclined to travel to the UK following a leave vote. This, coupled with seven per cent fall in exchange rate to ₹93.23 per pound, is expected to make these popular travel destinations offer discounts and lure international customers.

“Travel to the UK will be cheaper for Indian travellers, thanks to depreciation of the pound against the rupee,” said Anil Khandelwal, CFO, Cox & Kings.

And the good part is that the Brexit is likely to have little impact on the travel paperwork – though Indian travellers might have to cope with longer queues.

“Visas were anyway different for the UK and the rest of the European Union (Schengen) and it will continue to do so. However, Indian travellers might have to cope with longer queues at London’s Heathrow, where lines till now moved fast, as EU citizens entered through a separate line without any restrictions. With Brexit, those travellers could potentially join Indians and other international travellers in one queue for non-UK citizens.

The drop in the value of pound sterling against Indian rupee has brought cheer to students. “With fees paid in tranches (once every 3 to 4 months) it is a boon for students like me – at least from a short term perspective,” said Amandeep Singh, who would be migrating to the UK in September to study Masters at the Cambridge University. About 18,320 Indians migrated to the UK for pursuing studies during the financial year 2014-15.

According to industry estimates, an undergraduate and a post-graduate student has to shell-out £15,000 and £25,000 a year respectively, while a management graduate spends close to £30,000 for pursuing higher education in UK.

However, completing studies is still not a guarantee for getting jobs in the UK. Getting jobs will continue to remain a challenge – given that the UK authorities are giving fewer job visas to migrants. “The highly-skilled migrant programme and its latter version called the Tier-1 visa have already been scrapped” said an Indian, who settled abroad in UK few years back under the highly-skilled migrant programme and didn’t want to be named.

However, he added that the silver lining is that leaving the EU would force UK to treat all immigrants under same the set of rules. In the past, the non-European aspirants bore the brunt of UK’s control over its net immigration rate (since many were from EU). “But now there won't be a discriminatory system skewed in favour of other EU countries,” he added.

Poor economic conditions in UK could mean curb on expansion plans outside of Europe. “I expect even my official trips to be curbed” under the garb of cutting costs said an Indian official working for a company, headquartered in the UK.

(Radhika Chander, an intern with the BL Research Bureau, contributed to the story)