Canadians now need a permit for short-term visits to the U.K.

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 planning to visit the United Kingdom for less than six months 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 is new for Canadians flying to the U.K., but a similar system has been in place since 2016 for people from several other countries who travel by air to Canada.

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." 

A growing trend 

Electronic travel authorizations are becoming more common around the world.

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

Twenty-seven countries in the EU are expected to launch a similar system by the end of this year. Smith said he fully expects to see ETAs implemented in the U.S. during Donald 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," Smith said.

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

'The price of travelling'

The application costs £10, or about $18 Cdn. But there's no guarantee those prices will remain at that level. Since tourists are the ones paying the application fees, Smith said politicians can easily raise the costs. 

"Once they're in the system and they're paying for the system, all of a sudden I could see those things rising quite dramatically," he said. 

"People wouldn't necessarily blink at paying $50 for that — it's the price of travelling." 

Another possibility Smith said wouldn't surprise him is that the fees could take on dynamic pricing, with certain times of the year being more expensive to travel than others. 

Accessibility is also concern, said Smith. 

"I have a 78-year-old mother that hates technology in every single way, and so something like this would be a real barrier to her travelling," he said. 

"All these things can be very frustrating to a lot of people and make travel inaccessible." 

Smith said travel agents are making a comeback, and helping people submit their ETA applications is another service they could offer. 

A word of advice

Approvals for ETA applications can take as little as 10 minutes, said Smith, but that doesn't mean people should take the risk of waiting for their flight to land before submitting their application.

Without the authorization, travellers could be turned away and sent back to the country they came from, he said. 

"I would highly recommend anyone do this multiple weeks before you go, just like any other visas," Smith said. "Make sure you have everything, that you have copies of things, that you take a screenshot of your approval." 

Once an authorization has been approved, it will last for two years and can be used as many times as desired during that time.