Europe’s new automated border system, which went into full effect on April 11, was supposed to make border checks more efficient and easier for travelers. But as the Entry/Exit System, or EES, enters its first summer season, some travelers say they have encountered chaotic airport lines, were sent back to repeat fingerprint and facial scans, and have even missed flights and connections.
British traveler David Newton told the U.K.’s iPaper that he and his family were stuck in a five-hour line at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle International Airport (CDG), causing them to miss their flight back to England this past spring. Forced to book a new return, they waited another four hours to check their bags, then went through the EES process all over again. In total, they spent 11 hours at the airport.
But Newton’s experience may not be an outlier. At the International Air Transport Association’s (IATA) annual meeting in Rio de Janeiro this week, Rafael Schvartzman, IATA’s regional vice president for Europe, warned that EES could leave passengers facing “challenging waiting times” of “three, four, five, and even six hours.”
“Which is unacceptable,” he said.
The warning was followed by a new research report released by the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) on Tuesday that found that one-third of travelers are less likely to travel to Europe’s Schengen Area or would not visit at all if they expect to face regular border wait times of three to four hours. The report was based on a survey of 2,500 travelers from the U.K., U.S., Canada, and Australia.
The study found that while there is strong support for modern border controls, travelers’ desire and willingness to visit Europe falls drastically when there’s a possibility they have to wait in unwieldy lines that stand to uproot their travel plans.
Among other efforts, WTTC is calling for increased awareness and education around the new process so that travelers better understand what is involved.
What is EES?
EES is meant to replace manual passport stamps with a digital record of when non-European travelers enter and exit the Schengen Area, a group of 29 countries where travelers can generally move between member states without passport checks. The system collects passport details, facial images, fingerprints, and the entry and exit dates for travelers from outside of Europe, including Brits.
When travelers first enter one of the 29 European countries in the Schengen Area, they must create their biometric digital file at a self-service kiosk by scanning their passport and submitting their facial scan and fingerprints. That record lasts for three years and is then used by the border authorities of each of the 29 countries to verify the passenger’s identity when they enter and exit the country. To pass through the automated border gates, passengers must rescan their passport and resubmit their fingerprints and facial scan.
What went wrong
Unfortunately, many travelers were unaware that they would first need to create a biometric digital file upon entering Europe for the first time, adding time to the process. In some cases, travelers have had to create the biometric file multiple times due to various hiccups.
Because each country is responsible for installing and operating its own EES infrastructure, the rollout has been uneven. Airports with higher passenger volumes, including Barcelona, Lisbon, and Paris, have faced especially long waits. Journalist Clarissa Ward recently posted on Instagram about the lengthy lines she encountered in Lisbon, for example.
Airports and airlines say this process has added more pressure at border checkpoints, not reduced it. According to IATA, passport checks typically took 20 to 25 seconds before EES. Under the new system, those checks now take 90 seconds when everything works perfectly.
Even before the system became fully mandatory in April, Europe’s airports and airlines had warned of trouble. In a March 30 joint statement, ahead of the Easter travel season, Airports Council International (ACI) Europe and Airlines for Europe (A4E) said that wait times at airport border gates were already “regularly reaching up to two hours” at peak traffic times, with some airports hitting even longer times. An A4E spokesperson said border control remains the “sole responsibility of national authorities,” with the industry groups blaming delays on understaffing, glitchy self-service kiosks, malfunctioning e-gates, and a laggy central EES IT system.
A haphazard and unpredictable experience
John, a British lecturer at a U.K. university who asked to be identified by his first name only, has traveled to Europe from the U.K. twice since EES was implemented. He described the process to Afar as “a mess.” It appears that passengers are being asked to create a digital record more than once, while for others, the e-gate process is a slow one, as passengers scan their passports, fingerprints, and faces and wait for the system to verify their identity and open the gate. Groups are also being separated from one another depending on the line they choose. Many passengers were also unaware that EES had been implemented.
On a recent trip to Italy with his American girlfriend and her two sisters, John noted that all four had entered their fingerprints and facial scans on earlier trips to Europe. In theory, that meant their biometric digital record should have already been in the EES system, allowing them to enter and exit the Schengen Area without resubmitting it. But when they tried to leave Florence, two of the party passed through the e-gates without issue, while John and one of the sisters were sent back to the biometric kiosks to repeat their facial scans and fingerprints. The extra checks took another 45 minutes. “We just about got to the airport with enough time,” John said. “I can imagine if you’re cutting it a bit fine, you could very well miss your flight.”
The confusion is not limited to airports. Sarah Hill, a British civil servant traveling by Eurostar, the high-speed train service from London to Lille, France, under a group booking, said she joined one of several lines at random, only to discover hers required her to resubmit fingerprint and facial scans while the rest of her group continued through other lines. The scan itself “wasn’t too onerous,” Hill said, but the lack of clear information made the queue management exasperating.
For travelers heading to, through, or from Europe this summer, the advice is loud and clear: Build in much more time than usual.
Yvonne Moynihan, the U.K. managing director of European budget airline Wizz Air, told the BBC that passengers should arrive at least three hours ahead of their flight.
First-time biometric registration should create a digital file that can be used on later crossings, but passengers may still be asked to verify their face and fingerprints when entering or leaving the Schengen Area. That makes tight layovers through major European hubs very risky, especially for families and groups who may be separated, as some are required to re-create their biometric record and others are not. Children are also included in EES. Those under 12 years old will not have to provide fingerprints, but they will be photographed and have digital records created for them.
