What did Brexit do for travel? You may not enjoy finding out

What were you doing on 23 June 2016? Perhaps, like me, voting in the EU referendum.

Seven years ago, the world changed overnight for UK travellers. The consequences are still unravelling.

The most immediate – and lasting – impact was to push up costs for British travellers abroad. When the “Leave” result came in, sterling immediately slumped as international financial markets anticipated the economic damage caused by Brexit.

Against the US dollar, which dictates costs across the airline industry, the pound is currently down 13 per cent compared with the day before the referendum; the cruel arithmetic of reciprocals means aviation fuel or aircraft leases cost 15 per cent more. In the eurozone, that coffee or car rental is about one-eighth more expensive.

If you were among the majority who, as a perfectly respectable political choice, voted successfully to Leave, you helped win these seven changes for British travellers to Europe (and, sometimes, within the UK):

Strict limits on the time you can spend in the EU and wider Schengen Area. Take a winter break for the first three months of the year in Spain and you can’t return to anywhere in Schengen until the end of June. You must also prove to EU frontier officials you can afford your stay, and show an onward or return ticket. Also, don‘t bring a cheese or ham sandwich with you (unless you are travelling direct from Northern Ireland to the EU).

Chaotic scenes at ports never designed to house a hard EU external frontier due to the passport-checking rules we asked to become subject to.

Fewer seats and higher fares on Eurostar, which cannot sell all its tickets because of overcrowding at stations resulting from those extra passport checks. The cross-Channel train firm also blames extra Brexit red tape for ending links from Ebbsfleet, Ashford and Disneyland Paris.

A return of roaming charges for British mobile phone users in Europe.

New rules make it far more difficult and expensive to take a pet abroad, or from Great Britain to Northern Ireland.

Damaging inbound tourism to the UK by banning more than 200 million EU citizens who have national identity cards but not passports.

Ending London to Belfast flights by the Irish airline Aer Lingus.

But enough moaning: seven years on is an excellent time to celebrate the majority decision to go it alone. Ministers insist leaving the EU “has given the UK a world of future opportunities”. With the help of the government’s Benefits of Brexit document, I have identified all three of the travel advantages so you don’t have to.

Only a cynic still lamenting losing the democratic vote would point out that any government could have changed the colour of British passports at any time while we were in the EU. For example, Croatia’s passports are as deeply blue as the Adriatic.

Next time you’re sweltering in the non-EU line at Split or Dubrovnik airport, you might catch a glimpse of one as the holder breezes past.