Visiting friends

The "carta de invitacion" is required for all those travelling with a visa during the visa application process. As UK citizens are visa free in the EU this letter is not required.

There has been the usual scare mongering in the UK press which says you need to prove a return ticket, hotel booking or a letter from friends and family but nobody that I've read have ever been stopped. The same as having a shed load of money to buy things. One of those requirements needed to enter UK as well but never heard of anyone being stopped.

Thank you. 

I agree with Marcliff, I reported the Sun on the News channel for scaremongering and saying it was a new rule. Their headline said new charges for British tourists for new rule. It isn’t new but I have sent an email invitation to all the visitors we’ve had since coming to live here but none of them have been asked for anything. Only passports. I think it’s more for people who travel on a one way ticket and look like they are not on holiday. 

There's definitely more to this than meets the eye. I think there's an unsaid government campaign to discredit overseas travel in order to prop up a failing home economy.

Like a lot of these things it's very hard to prove but it's not a coincidence that so many government supporting media outlets are carrying scare stories.

Definitely agree. I think there’s a new abundance of scare mongering among the media outlets to keep people’s minds off what’s really going on in the government and finance markets. How come suddenly supermarkets can now advertise reducing prices. 

Interesting that the government were "concerned" about a report that supermarkets were price gouging on fuel prices (failing to drop pump prices when costs had significantly reduced), and told everyone vehemently that they would act, well guess what, today they quietly announced they're not going to do anything about it.

Regarding the foreign travel scare stories, if we believe there is a coordinated campaign - and it certainly looks coordinated - that means there's a secret ops team somewhere in Whitehall deciding what stories to drop and when. Which is quite scary stuff.

So far, and maybe others can add to this list, we've had

• Massive queues at passport control (rather ironic that one!)

• Fines for smoking

• Fines for taking your top off

• "Clamp downs on boozy Brits"

• Letters of invitation 

• Shark attack on Spanish beach

• Heatwave will kill you

No doubt there will be more before the summer's out.

These scare stories have been appearing in quite a few newspapers. There is a general rule that you need to show evidence of where you are staying, a return or onward ticket and sufficient money for your stay. Whenever i travel to the Far East i take something to cover these and have been asked for evidence of where i am staying a couple of times. Now we have left the EU we need similar evidence for european countries which should be easily obtainable, it’s just that travellers to europe are not used to the general global rules we now have to follow.