Europe’s new border machine is already making travellers wait

The European Union has managed a familiar feat: it has built a digital system to speed things up and, for many travellers, made them slower. At Rome’s Fiumicino airport, the new Entry Exit System has nearly tripled the time some UK passengers spend at passport control, even after adjustments were made. Ryanair, never shy of a complaint when delays hit its customers, has warned travellers heading to Europe this summer to expect longer waits.

The system is called the Entry Exit System, or EES, and it requires non-EU citizens entering the Schengen area to register fingerprints and a photo on arrival, with the data checked when they leave. In theory, this should be tidy, efficient and reassuringly modern. In practice, some airports have seen queues lasting hours, with passengers reporting missed flights home and the usual airport cocktail of irritation, fatigue and bad planning all around.

Rome offers the clearest example of how the grand design collides with reality. Fiumicino invested €12 million in self-service kiosks, only to find that large volumes of passengers could not be handled that way in a practical manner. Ivan Bassato, the airport’s Chief Aviation Officer, said the integration with e-gates had improved matters significantly, but still admitted that the time for UK nationals to get through border control had risen from seven minutes to 20. That is not a small adjustment; it is the difference between a process and a problem.

Bassato also said the airport was not prepared to accept waits of one or two hours and argued that the system needs urgent fixes, especially to remove duplication. He would like more countries to use the EU’s pre-registration app, though at present only Sweden and Portugal do so. That detail alone says much about the Union’s talent for launching common systems and then relying on a patchwork of national improvisation to make them work.

Portugal, meanwhile, has its own version of the same story. At Faro airport, border police told the BBC that the technology has bugs, and that a ten-minute queue can sometimes stretch beyond thirty minutes. Superintendent Pedro Oliveira said long waits were still rare, though they could happen if several planes arrived together. He also described a system that depends heavily on connected servers, so that a problem in Warsaw can ripple all the way to Faro. The modern border, it seems, is only as strong as its weakest server.

The European Commission says disruption is limited in most EU airports and insists it will continue to support member states in implementing the system. Airports and airlines have pressed Brussels to allow countries to suspend the process ahead of busy periods, but a recent meeting produced no change. Children under 12 cannot use the e-gates and must see a border officer; in Portugal, children under 16 are recorded by border police staff instead. The result is a system that is digital, expensive and still heavily dependent on human intervention. A triumph of administrative ambition, perhaps. A model of convenience, less so.

Written by Thomas Nussbaumer thomas.nussbaumer@alpineweekly.com