A travel expert has shared five vital passport checks Brits should make before jetting off on holiday this summer – and failing to do so could mean being denied boarding at the airport
Many people will be going on a holiday soon(Image: Getty Images)
Many people will be counting down the days until their next holiday. With children set to wrap up for the school year, many families are gearing up for a summer of fun. Now a travel business owner has called on all British passport holders to carry out five crucial checks before jetting off abroad this summer.
Kate Donnelly, who posts travel advice on TikTok, urged her followers to take action now to prevent being turned away at the departure gate. While some of her guidance might appear straightforward to experienced travellers, she insists certain issues continue to trip up numerous Brits and wreck their holiday plans at the eleventh hour.
Passport validity
Her initial recommendation is to verify the expiry date – as the majority of European destinations require at least three months’ validity remaining from the date you depart the country.
“This is slightly different if you are travelling to Turkey where you have to have a validity of 150 days on the day you actually arrived,” Kate explained. “So it’s really important you check the country you are travelling to and see what their rule is.”
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10-year rule
Following this, Kate alerted her followers to the 10-year rule, which she states is applicable to most of Europe. “On the day that you enter [the country] your passport has to be less than 10-years-old – so it’s important you check the issue date as well as the expiry, especially if your passport was renewed before 2018 because unused months from your old passport will have likely been added on to your new on meaning that your passport is probably 10-years plus,” she said. “This is catching so many people out.”
Blank pages
Third on Kate’s list is the matter of blank pages in your passport. “This isn’t as important as due to the new Entry-Exit System (EES) in Europe we are slowly phasing out passport stamping,” she admitted. “But the reality is lots of countries are bringing in measures, which means the EES is paused.”
Regrettably, when travelling to such destinations, you won’t discover whether the EES is operational or not until you get there. “Therefore if the airline checks your passport and you have no empty pages left, they are well within their right to refuse boarding,” Kate warned.
Condition
Kate proceeded to emphasise the physical state of your passport is something that is frequently neglected and could present a genuine obstacle to your travel arrangements. “If it has water damage, if it has fake tan on it, if it is torn or you can’t read any of the writing for whatever reason, this is also enough grounds for the airline to deny you boarding,” she elaborated.
Dual-nationals
Kate directed her final piece of advice at dual-nationals, who are impacted by a rule modification that came into effect in the UK in February. “UK citizens have to ensure they have a UK passport or a certificate of entitlement when they are entering or exiting the UK,” she continued. “This means that you can no longer use your non-UK passport – even if you are recognised as a British citizen.
She closed by advising the certificate of entitlement is £589 and therefore it is more “cost-effective” for dual-nationals to apply for their UK passport to keep alongside their non-UK one at all times. “This means you have the two to use freely depending on which country you are travelling to,” Kate said.
Matt’s family say he often struggled to emotionally switch off from football, and that negative comments on social media had begun to have an impact on his mental health.
He found breaking bad news to players about their place in the squad or future plans particularly difficult emotionally, according to Debbie.
“Matt always felt so bad having to let someone down,” she explains. “There would be tears, they might have shouted at him, and the player’s family and the fans could sometimes be negative towards him too.
“He and other staff members would make the decisions but, because he had to deliver the news, the emotional burden all came down on to him.
“Matt was there for everybody and he hated letting people down. He looked out for everyone else, but sadly not himself.”
In the summer leading up to his death, Matt had been appointed manager of Burnley in the third tier.
But Matt’s family say he wasn’t happy with the way the club was being run. WSL side Leicester City made it known they were interested in hiring Matt.
BBC Sport understands Burnley turned down an offer from Leicester to buy out the rest of Matt’s contract. Matt then resigned, but the move to Leicester never came to pass.
Burnley placed Matt on gardening leave, meaning he was unable to work or talk to other clubs for a period of three months.
Burnley declined a request to comment from BBC Sport on the nature of Matt’s departure from the club.
THE new EES rules have caused chaos for Brits heading on their recent holidays with reports of three-hour long queues and even cases of missed flights.
So if you’re after an easy escape to a beautiful island with no biometric requirements, there is a European country which is hitting highs of 26C next week.
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Cyprus is easily accessible for Brits – with no EES checksCredit: AlamyCyprus’ Golden Beach is ranked one of the best in the worldCredit: Alamy
Follow The Sun’s award-winning travel team on Instagram and Tiktok for top holiday tips and inspiration @thesuntravel.
EES has been causing chaos across Europe in places like Lanzarote and Greece, but Cyprus doesn’t follow these new rules.
Cyprus is an EU member state, but isn’t part of the Schengen area, and so it didn’t have to enforce the new EES requirement.
In fact, Brits with a valid passport can visit the country for up to 90 days without the need for a visa.
The island itself gets over 300 days of sunshine each year and is known for having beautiful beaches – including one of the best in the world.
In the Europe list of ‘World’s Best Beaches‘, Golden Beach found on the Karpaz Peninsula in the north of the island comes in at number 30 out of 50.
The beach has 2.4 miles of sand and is known for its wild beauty and sand dunes – it’s a place where you’ll find sea turtle nesting grounds.
Cyprus is reaching highs of 26C and gets 300 days of sunshine each yearCredit: AlamyFlights to Cyprus only take a few hours to get to by flightCredit: Alamy
Some of the most popular spots in Cyprus include Limassol and Paphos.
Talking to Sun Travel, he said: “For anyone going to Larnaca, I have three recommendations. One is a new restaurants called Theta in Perivolia which is very near the airport.
“It does Mediterranean food, but done in the style of a Dubai 5-star restaurant.
“There’s another one called Opa Souvlaki Kiti, it’s not fancy, but if you want a proper Greek kebab done the Cypriot way, go there.”
You can visit Hylatio Tourist Village from £63pppnCredit: Hylatio
When it comes to eating and drinking out in Cyprus, you can pick up a beer from €3 (£2.59) and an inexpensive meal can start from €15 (£12.97).
With UK temperatures dropping and potential drizzle forecast for next week, you might want to consider booking a last-minute break – and there are still some great deals about.
With On The Beach, you can jet off to Paphos for an all-inclusive break from £440pp – or £63pppn.
This is for a seven-night stay at the Hylatio Tourist Village which has a sun terrace, outdoor swimming pool, tennis courts and entertainment nights with live music.
The site has its own restaurant and bar – and the price includes all three meals and snacks as well as flights that depart on May 11.
You can stay at Atlantica Panthea Resort from £65pppnCredit: Atlantica
The complex is a short walk from the Blue Flag Pissouri Beach.
Another deal from On the Beach is at Atlantica Panthea Resort in the Larnaca region which can be booked from £455pp – or £65pppn.
Minutes from the beach, the hotel also has its own swim spots from outdoor pool to heated ones indoors.
Rooms vary from doubles to family size and suites – all with neutral decor and private balconies or terrace.
There are multiple restaurants, bars and snack spots for guests.
Flights depart London Gatwick on May 13 returning on May 20.
Italy and Portugal have been tipped to follow Greece in scrapping the EU’s Entry/Exit System (EES) border checks at airports, which have caused chaos for some British holidaymakers
09:17, 03 May 2026Updated 09:38, 03 May 2026
Airports in Greece have already scrapped the new rules (file)(Image: AFP/Getty Images)
Travel experts believe Italy and Portugal could be the next two countries to ditch EU border checks at airports.
Many British holidaymakers are suffering delays at airports on continental Europe because of the rollout of new border rules. The EU’s Entry/Exit System (EES) involves people from external countries such as the UK having their fingerprints registered and photograph taken to enter the Schengen Area.
More than 100 easyJet passengers stuck in delays at passport desks at Milan Linate airport missed a flight to Manchester last month. Greece has already ditched the new rules for UK holidaymakers until September after they led to huge queues.
Airports in Portugal are reportedly already waving passengers through if queues get too big. Italy is expected to follow Greece and allow people to enter on a passport stamp as the May half-term looms. Places like Spain, France and Croatia could do the same.
Seamus McCauley, of travel company Holiday Extras, told the Mail: “The rollout has been an utter fiasco. British tourists are worth €3.5billion a year to the Greek economy and it has rightly decided it will not jeopardise that because EES is not working properly.”
He said it “seems certain” Italy and Portugal will do the same as Greece. He added: “After that the whole system could collapse like a house of cards, with Spain, France and Croatia coming to the same conclusion because nobody wants to see their tourist trade go to another country simply to comply with the EU.
“Greece broke ranks and Portugal keeps suspending the rules. Others are almost certain to follow. Something has to give.”
It comes as Ryanair says passengers who need to use its airport check-in or bag-drop services will be required to finish the process 20 minutes earlier.
The airline announced it will close the services an hour before the scheduled departure of a flight – compared to 40 minutes at the moment – to give passengers more time to get through security and passport checks.
This will reduce the “very small number of passengers” who miss their flight while stuck in queues, the carrier added. Ryanair’s website says passengers who fail to check in on time “may be denied boarding without refund”.
The advent of autonomous treasury has ignited a competitive push, complete with aggressive industry targets. Not all companies will want to proceed at the same speed.
The shift to an autonomous treasury is reshaping the world of corporate finance, driven by new strategies and technologies—from self-healing cash forecasts to AI-driven liquidity engines—that are replacing legacy systems and maximizing yield.
To fully realize the potential, corporate finance leaders are strategically investing in the key areas that will accelerate the transition. The next phase of autonomous treasury will be defined by three investment-focus areas, says Sayantan Chakraborty, head of Digital Payments at Fiserv. “Treasurers don’t lack visibility anymore; they lack widgets that can act on that visibility in real time,” he says. “The gap isn’t analytics. It’s execution.”
Although agentic AI can forecast cash positions and draft funding instructions, Chakraborty notes, current corporate infrastructure often runs in batch mode. The first essential missing link is comprehensive, real-time cash positioning, second, it’s combined with rule-based, just-in-time money movement across multiple payment rails—including instant and traditional—and third, integration of new features like tokenized deposits and programmable payments.
The technological journey still requires human expertise, however. And Chakraborty advises building around legacy ERP systems rather than waiting for a complete modernization.
“Think of it as an AI-powered autopilot added to an older cockpit,” he says. “Policies are enforced, actions are executed, and audit trails are preserved without forcing a full-core replacement on day one, under the watchful eyes of a trained cockpit and cabin crew.”
The era of multi-year, big-bang upgrades is over, Chakraborty argues. Instead, the best course is to implement a lightweight, 24/7 automation layer to handle real-time balances, rules, and payments.
As instant payment rails and real-time reporting become more widespread, Chakraborty predicts the current practice of pre-funding accounts before cut-offs will become obsolete. Instead, “agentic AI will push treasury from once-a-day instructions to continuous, just-in-time funding: as soon as execution matches intent across all rails.”
This shift will impact float, causing idle-balance float to decrease and driving banks to focus their earnings on 24/7 clearing services, intraday credit, and real-time liquidity.
Siemens, a leader in autonomous treasury, adopted J.P. Morgan’s programmable payment feature (formerly Onyx, now Kinexys) in late 2023. Siemens shifted to advanced programmable payments using the blockchain-based ledger, JPM Coin. This allows their bank accounts to autonomously manage cash and execute transactions based on pre-defined rules. Addressing the inefficiency of idle pre-funded balances, Siemens implemented a just-in-time mechanism. Funds are only moved into a specific account the moment a payment is due. If a balance drops below a set threshold, the system autonomously sweeps funds from a central cash pool, enabling Siemens to operate with near-zero balances in local accounts.
“In my experience, the biggest challenge is not technology, but the mindset shift in finance and treasury,” states Heiko Nix, global head of Cash Management and Payments, Siemens. “For almost every technical problem, there is a solution. But simplifying entrenched processes and changing how people think about treasury and its role takes significantly more time and effort. In practice, you do not need to convince everyone at once, what matters is building sufficient momentum across the organization to enable real transformation.”
John Stevens, Kyriba
A ‘Forward-Looking Control Tower’
AI creates a strategic opportunity, argues John Stevens, senior vice president, global head of Capital Markets, Financial Institutions & Working Capital at Kyriba.
“AI can transform working capital management from a retrospective reporting function into a forward-looking control tower,” he says. “Instead of focusing on past events, you can optimize for the future in real time. This is because tasks that previously required manual, analog effort, or demanded analysts to spend long hours consolidating reports, can now occur instantaneously. This real-time capability allows for significantly more sensible and timely decision-making.”
Companies still need to work closely with vendors to build AI safely, he cautions: “We don’t see a single out-of-the-box ‘autonomous’ product replacing the diversity of treasury needs.” The future will be “composable,” he predicts, although it is important to be precise about what this means.
While Kyriba App Studio serves as an extensibility layer for building bespoke integrations and workflows on the Kyriba platform, Stevens stresses that it is not an agent-building toolkit. The agentic AI layer is TAI, which provides Kyriba-developed agents with “a clear human in the loop posture.”
Using a third-party model doesn’t automatically make an AI tool less intelligent and using only in house-models doesn’t automatically make it more intelligent, he argues.
“In treasury, the deciding factor is whether the AI can be used safely and consistently in a regulated environment,” Stevens says. TAI isn’t positioned to avoid external LLMs. “We use a leading external model [Anthropic’s Claude] within a controlled, governed deployment. The difference is the wrapper around the model: strict limits on what data it can access, clear rules on what it’s allowed to do, and a full audit trail of activity.”
Practically, that means the AI can help generate insights—summaries, explanations, flag anomalies, scenario narratives—while anything that could affect payments, liquidity, or risk stays under platform controls, approvals, and policy-driven workflows.
“So it’s not a binary choice between open and sovereign,” he notes. “Some organizations will require sovereign options for policy or jurisdiction reasons, but most regulated treasuries are looking for governed AI: strong models, used in a way that is secure, auditable, and designed for real operational control.”
Redefining Corporate Finance
The potential benefits to treasury have ignited a competitive push for autonomy, complete with aggressive industry targets and a race for “fully autonomous” platforms.
HighRadius recently updated its agentic AI platform with the goal of achieving over 90% automation for the Office of the CFO by 2027. The initiative involves deploying AI agents across six product suites and 20 products within accounts receivable, payables, treasury, close, and consolidation. The release of 186 agentic AI agents, announced last February, moves HighRadius closer to the “fully autonomous platform vision” it first announced in 2019, with cash application and cash forecasting already demonstrating 90% touchless automation.
HighRadius prioritizes “measurable value creation,” which it validates with clients through mutually agreed success criteria (MASC). This value is delivered via automated agents, aiming for 90%-plus automation, and assisted agents, designed to triple user effectiveness.
CEO Sashi Narahari views agentic AI as an interim step toward HighRadius’s goal of ensuring that all its products are “fully autonomous”—defined as 90%-plus touchless end-to-end process—by 2027. Narahari stresses the critical nature of this goal, to the point that failing to achieve it would lead to the company’s demise.
What about mid-tier banks that may not want to jump to a comprehensive transformation? For them, Chakraborty advises that a single, reliable orchestration endpoint is better than many disparate APIs.
“Essential to this is a real time balance plus payment execution API,” he says “exposing positions, limits, and instant movement through a single, resilient interface. That’s what lets AI driven treasury systems act as agents, not just analysts.” Integrating such a process with tokenized deposit movement is also beneficial where possible, he adds.
That said, the journey toward the autonomous treasury, spearheaded by pioneering companies like Siemens and driven by the rapid evolution of agentic AI, is fundamentally redefining corporate finance.
The shift is not merely about incremental efficiency gains but is coming to be seen as a strategic imperative for maximizing yield, securing real-time liquidity, and moving beyond the constraints of legacy systems. Corporate treasurers who are embracing the transition are attracted by a promised tactical roadmap to a future-proofed role. For the financial institutions that serve them, autonomous treasury is an urgent call to align their offerings with a new era of continuous, intelligent, and just-in-time financial control.
The European Union’s (EU) Entry/Exit System (EES) has caused major travel disruptions across European airports, and a travel expert has issued three key checks every traveller should do
A travel expert has advised on three vital checks Brits should do before heading to the airport(Image: Getty Images/Stock Photo)
A travel expert said there are three key checks every holidaymaker should make before heading to the airport, following the new EU rules.
As of April 10, 2025, the European Union’s (EU) Entry/Exit System (EES) was fully implemented across European airports. It requires all Brits travelling to the Schengen area to “create a digital record” and register their biometric details, such as fingerprints and a photograph.
The new digital border system has replaced manual passport stamping, and after the initial registration, the EES remains valid for three years. While it’s only needed for the first arrival at the airport border in the Schengen area, it’s caused major travel chaos as thousands of British holidaymakers register with the new system, leading to significant queues and delays of up to four hours across European airports.
Adam Edinburgh, Head of Travel and New Products at Post Office Insurance, told the Mirror: “Passengers may be impacted by facing longer queues initially due to biometric data collection, a process expected to take several minutes per person.
“Passengers should be encouraged to plan contingency options if travelling on a tight schedule (alternative routes or transport), as any teething problems or incomplete information could cause delays to miss flights, ferries, or connections.”
The travel expert also outlined three vital checks that Brits should do before heading to the airport, in a bid to make their journey as smooth as possible following the rollout of the EES. He advised:
“Check your passport expiry date (must be valid for at least 3 months after your trip for EU countries)
“Know your entry airport’s EES setup (expect biometric checks)
“Keep essential travel documents easily accessible, including passports, travel insurance, accommodation confirmation, and proof of onward or return travel.”
Explaining exactly how the EES works, Adam said: “Travellers entering for the first time will undergo biometric registration at border kiosks or e-gates. This includes the system capturing a facial image, fingerprints (if visa-exempt), passport details, and entry/exit information.
“For subsequent visits, the process will be faster due to the data already being stored. It’s important to note that no pre-registration is required – registration happens at the border during your first entry. “
Countries in the Schengen area include: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland. The EES system is not required for travel into the Republic of Ireland and Cyprus, as they are not within the Schengen area, and Greece has relaxed its EU requirements for Brits, ditching the need for biometric details.
