New requirements for travelling across the pond

Starting today, Canadians with short-term travel plans to England, Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland will need an electronic travel authorization — or an ETA.

Travellers will be asked to submit information such as their passport details, dates of travel and modes of transportation, which will be reviewed by authorities.

The digital pre-screening system is new for the U.K., but a similar one has been in place in Canada since 2016.

It's "kind of like doing a pre-approval for a credit card," said Wayne Smith, the director of the Institute for Hospitality and Tourism Research at Toronto Metropolitan University. 

The system will run applicants' information through a worldwide database before granting approval, Smith told CBC P.E.I.'s Island Morning. 

"It allows all the governments to be more interconnected and talking to one another and sharing information," he said. 

"It creates a much more secure security blanket for everyone involved." 

Electronic travel authorizations are becoming more common around the world.

"This will be prevalent globally in a few years," Smith said. 

More than 30 countries in the EU are expected to launch a similar system by the end of this year. Smith said he fully expects to see it implemented in the U.S. during Trump's presidency, too. 

The system is meant to assist with concerns about immigration and refugee status, he said. 

"You could check if someone has, for example, gone to three different countries and claimed refugee status. Or you can check… if they've come and actually been denied visas in other places before, if people have overstayed their visas in other countries.

"All those things will now be... caught before the person even leaves their home country."  

The application costs £10 — about $18 CAD. But there's no guarantee those prices will remain at that level, Smith said.