Vaping on holiday: check the local law before you pack

At home you know where you stand: kits are rechargeable and refillable, nicotine tops out at 20mg/ml, and adults can buy freely. None of that applies once you leave. Every country sets its own rules on vapes, and they range from relaxed to complete bans.

That means the questions change. Can you bring a vape in at all? Can you bring e-liquid? Can you use it in public? A product that is perfectly legal on your local high street could be a problem at the arrivals hall.

The good news is that checking takes minutes. Here is the order to do it in.

The gov.uk foreign travel advice pages are written for British travellers and kept up to date. Each country page has a section on local laws and customs, which is where any rules on vapes or e-cigarettes will usually be mentioned.

If the page says vapes are banned, believe it, even if you have heard of people getting away with it. If it mentions restrictions on where you can vape, follow them. If it says nothing, that does not guarantee anything; it just means you should look a bit further, for example at official sources from the country itself.

Tap what the advice told you.

If vaping is fine where you are going, the next challenge is not running out. Do not count on finding your usual pods or coils abroad. Products sold in other countries are made for their own rules, and your device may not take what they sell.

Pack enough for the whole trip plus a bit spare. Refillable kits with 10ml bottles travel well because they are small and sealed. Bring the charging cable too, and spare batteries in a battery case in your hand luggage.

Use this as your holiday packing list.

Whichever country you visit, the flying rules are consistent on the basics: vapes and spare batteries go in the cabin, never in checked luggage, and there is no vaping or charging on board. Liquids follow the security rules at each airport, which are 100ml containers at most airports and up to 2 litres where new scanners are live.

Do not forget the return leg. The airport you fly home from may run different liquids rules to the one you left from, so a bottle that sailed through Bristol might not get through somewhere else.

Full detail is in our guide to flying with a vape.

Holiday advice passed around in the pub or online tends to be confident and wrong. The trouble is that rules vary so much that one person's easy trip tells you nothing about your destination.

Stick to the official advice and you will not go far wrong. If the gov.uk page says no, the answer is no, however many people say they took one anyway. And if you are travelling through more than one country, check each of them, not just the final stop.

Tap to flip.

Layovers count too, so if you change planes somewhere, check that country as well.

One to check the main point stuck. If you take nothing else from this page, take this: the right answer always starts with the official travel advice for the country you are visiting.

When you are back home and stocking up again, remember that UK rules changed recently too, with a new duty on vape liquid since 1 October 2026 and the 18+ rule covering all vapes from 29 October 2026. Catch up on the UK vape law timeline.

Rules abroad can change at short notice, so check close to your travel date rather than relying on what you read when you booked months ago.