The European Union's new digital border system has nearly tripled the time British travellers spend clearing passport control, according to a senior figure at Rome's principal airport, even after improvements were introduced. The warning comes as Ryanair has urged passengers heading to Europe this summer to brace for extended delays.
“This support will continue to the fullest extent possible.” — the European Commission
Border police at Portugal's Faro airport told the BBC the Entry Exit System technology suffered from bugs, though they insisted any queues there would shorten quickly. The European Commission said disruption was limited at most EU airports and pledged to keep supporting member states as the system is rolled out. "This support will continue to the fullest extent possible," it added.
The digital Entry Exit System requires non-EU citizens entering the Schengen area, a bloc of twenty-nine European countries, to register fingerprints and a photograph on arrival, with the information checked again on departure. The process is usually handled by standalone automated machines called kiosks, and sometimes by border officers for travellers such as children under twelve. The new equipment has been phased in since October.
Some European airports have seen hours-long lines at passport control, and passengers have reported missing flights home. This week Ryanair branded the "failed EES rollout" a cause of needless delays and long queues, advising UK passengers to allow extra time and prepare for waits. In Rome, a perennially popular destination, travellers in the Piazza di Spagna were full of stories about the new checks.
One visitor described queuing two hours from plane to passport with young children, saying he expected it to be bad but not that bad. Another couple from the United States said the wait cost them about an hour and made them miss their pre-booked driver. Others had flown into Barcelona before a cruise brought them to Rome, only to face the same bottleneck on landfall.
Airlines and airports alike are pressing Brussels for clearer guidance and faster kiosks as the peak summer season builds. Until the technology matures, officials expect a bumpy transition that will test the patience of millions of travellers and the capacity of border forces already stretched by record post-pandemic demand for European holidays.
For now the advice from airports and airlines is identical and unglamorous: arrive early, expect queues, and treat the old thirty-minute connection as a relic of a faster era.
Border technology rollouts fail in predictable ways: the bottleneck is almost never the database but the first-time enrolment step, which cannot be parallelised at kiosks that airports bought too few of. The EES queues should genuinely shrink once the majority of frequent travellers are enrolled — the open question is whether that happens before or after the summer season damages a tourism economy still repaying pandemic-era debt.
