Flying to Europe is unpredictable right now. And it can be a downright pain. That’s not true at every airport and every day, but it’s challenging enough that many visitors are talking about staying away.
That’s because of hours-long lines that have popped up at immigration and passport control, with Europe’s new Entry/Exit system for travelings from outside the ‘Schengen Area’ of the E.U. (including Americans, Canadians and Brits).
Schengen border officers now digitally register most arriving travelers from outside of Europe both when they arrive and when they leave, collecting passport details plus biometrics, instead of relying on passport stamps. The system fully launched on April 10, 2026.
This is separate from ETIAS requirements which are still coming – visas that Americans and others will have to get before traveling to Europe which are like the ESTAs that visa waiver country citizens must get before traveling to the U.S.. They’re effectively expedited ‘online visas’ (advance permission to travel).
The big challenge is the first registration in Europe, since they now take fingerprints and a digital photo. The ‘EES’ record is valid for three years, and when more travelers have them the lines should be shorter. But right now nearly everyone is oging through for the first time. At roll out last month the queues were absolutely miserable.
EES biometric checks in force across Portugal from today, with significant congestion reported only at Faro Airport.https://t.co/zm16R33JiM#FaroAirport #EES #PortugalTravel #PortugalHoliday #Algarve #LisbonAirport #PortoAirport #PortugalNews #AlgarveNews #AlgarveDailyNews pic.twitter.com/xwE4tcwLBA
— Algarve Daily News (@algarve_news) April 10, 2026
However, the misery is still going on. Here’s a view this weekend of passport control in Las Palmas, Spain and also from Lisbon:
Gran Canaria passport control/immigration this weekend for those who don’t live in the EU.
This is not about Brexit per se although you will find many who blame it. There are simply many non-Schengen (mainly non-EU) citizens arriving at the same time. Especially given the €395… pic.twitter.com/7Cl07Tzp6R
— Miss Jo (@therealmissjo) May 25, 2026
Since we're talking airports: I'm Portuguese, and Lisbon's airport immigration is genuinely one of the worst first impressions of any country I know.
Two to four hour queues stretching across the entire terminal. People missing flights. Fights breaking out. Exhausted travelers… https://t.co/UO9mdZQ1ZV pic.twitter.com/u7cm4W62lj
— André (@oracles) May 26, 2026
Some airports or flights see little delay; while others are seeing hours-long queues. And this isn’t just an issue with arriving passengers. When things get bad for arriving passengers, they’ve been suspending the system. And then everyone needs to get registered for the first time as they’re departing, and departure control backs up for hours. IATA warned that we could see queues this summer of four hours or longer.
Milan Linate had over 100 easyJet passengers miss a single flight to Manchester flight after three hour waits. And 30 Ryanair passengers missed a Milan Bergamo to Manchester flight. In another case, only 34 out of 156 passengers made it to another flight out of Milan.
Málaga, Alicante, Lanzarote, Tenerife South, Gran Canaria, Reus, and Fuerteventura have been some of the worst cases along with Faro and Porto in Portugal, and Beauvais, Marseille, and Nantes in France.
- Preponderance of leisure travelers doing first-time EES registration
- High percentage of non-Schengen passengers (e.g. UK, U.S.)
- Banks of flights departing to non-Schengen destinations at the same time with limited border staffing, and broken kiosks
Things may remain bad through the summer 2026 peak, and possibly into fall, until more people get registered and a smaller percentage of passengers are doing this for the first time. So if you do go to Europe, know that you face the possibility of a long wait both on arrival and when departing a Schengen area airport for a non-Schengen one as well.
And since you go through EES registraton on arrival at your first Schengen airport, if you are connecting you may need to build longer connecting times. For instance, flying from the U.S. to Paris to Rome you need to assume a backup in Paris. You may wind up with plenty of time in the airport with nothing to do though. But I’d avoid tight separate-ticket itineraries like this right now, though.
And I’d be aggressive about asking staff for assistance if you’re going to miss a flight. Don’t just stand in line as your flight boards silently hoping to make it.
Flew in and out of Vienna this month and experienced no issues.
Irish passengers are not in the same category as US and UK – they are EU citizens and exempt from EES.
Connected in Madrid in late March and we must have registered without realizing it was the EES.
The machines are slow for mass registration, but they did have a reasonable number of them available at Barajas, and it seems like they started registration back in Oct.
Went through at CDG last week of April (transferring to a terminal 2f Shengen flight which is separate path than if CDG is your final destination—but both are supposed to be same EES procedures). Zero wait, though sky priority lines saved me maybe 10-15 minutes. No fingerprints were taken, nor did it appear the machine could. I allowed 6 hours for the connection…better safe than…
A spectacular F for planning for a zone formerly known for efficiency. Fights and heated exchange in the queue when I was at Brussels, with officials screaming at the cattle, er, passengers. a friend waiting for hours at Prague. Luckily I have no travel planned to Europe anymore this year. What an incompetent catastrophe!
Might be a good summer to stay home. Might be a good two or three years to stay in the United States.
@Mike P — A rare non-anarcho-libertarian comment from you. But, in this case, it provides context that supports my assumptions about your real aims. Vienna, huh? So, you really are just a Russian asset, aren’t you? (Vienna is widely considered one of the espionage capitals of the world.) No wonder you’re often spouting anti-government nonsense on here. Mike P… our resident chaos agent. Anyway, glad you had a nice trip. Psh.
This is great timely advice, and our observations will validate your comments. As a data point, I’ll add our experience from 2 weeks ago.
We flew KLM to Sweden via Amsterdam. On our outbound we waited about 30 minutes to go through passport control. It’s an interesting system, as everyone scans their passport at a station which then directs you to Line 1 or 2. Line 1 sends you to the automated passport control system, and Line 2 to the traditional manual processing. We were split, but didn’t want to be, so were advised that we could both go through Line 2. While waiting, it appeared at first that Line 2 was going much faster, as there appeared to be issues with the automated stations. But then that cleared up and it ended up taking longer to go through manually. There was NO LINE leading up to where we first scanned our passports.
With about a 2 hour layover, we were not sweating making our connecting flight, and made it fine. It was our return that had us most concerned, with only a 70 minute connect time (and KLM advising that they strictly end boarding at T-15). It is here that we noticed some real dysfunction.
The line we had went through to enter Schengen area passport control just a few days earlier was now stretching longer than we could see. Airport personnel were guiding people to where the end was. My guess is that anyone with a connection of less than 2.5 hours had little chance of making it.
As for us, exit processing was handled by the automated stations, and it only took about 10 minutes to clear. While we ran from the C Gates to the E Gates where our connecting flight was, we made it right when boarding commenced.
At the entrance to passport control leaving the Schengen Area, we noticed that there was a board that listed a few flights that were in the boarding process, and if you were on one, you could notify staff and they would allow you to be expedited by the manual passport control process. While the automated line looked intimidating (and we thought about asking for expedited processing) it moved along steady and was relatively quick.
All in all we lucked out. But it did enter into our calculus that if we did travel to a Schengen country again this year, the trip would end where we arrive – no connecting flights. Good luck to all adventurers out there!
Flew into and out from Milan MXP this month. Registered and through to baggage claim in 15 minutes from plane door. Outbound delays was 10 minutes as not all e-gates were open. Likely that delays may vary depending on the time of day. btw I had allowed 2 hours each way for possible lines.
Many countries have implemented these biometric procedures without causing the issues encountered in Europe.
I read a report from Spain where the lines were horrendous. There were many machines to record the biometrics, but these had not been installed and so everything was being done manually. Additionally, immigration staffing levels appeared to be far from adequate, possibly because these had been planned on the assumption that the machines were working?
Usual European incompetence?
Going to miss getting my passport stamped in Switzerland. That is how I remember how many times I was there. The machines started going in last year, you go to line one when you use the machine but they still did the survey last time I used it.
Just flew into Dublin and in/out of CDG in Paris last week. No issues at all.
Flew into Rome this weekend and it was an absolute nightmare. Hour long line at off hours and staff were completely incompetent to help people. Everyone was screaming and it was a mess.
The biggest failure seems to be not making any (apparent) provision for folks to do this in advance, even for a fee.
The second issue that strikes me is that they should probably just suspend mandating it outbound for 2026 (until they can get most at-least-annual travelers registered) to avoid cascades from the inbound registration suspensions.
@1990…It doesn’t seem possible that you’re as ignorant as you portray, but I could be wrong.
Wow, exactly what a Russian spy would say
Someone’s off its meds again.
Biometric hack, when going through the scan, there are short doors behind you, pull your roller bag ALL the way in so the little doors close before placing your passport in the reader and getting face scanned.
Barcelona was a breeze on May 8th. The walk from the plane was longer than going thru their biometric procedures and the luggage was even waiting for us at the end. Leaving was a whole different scenario though.
@ Gary — I really don’t understand what we went through on our late-April trip to Europe — on arrival to AMS from LHR, we had to do the digital photos and full fingerprints, and then all over again when exiting MUC to US (fortunately at the LH F lounge, so no queue). It felt like we had to register twice. Is this going to be the process every time from now on? Seems like a real PITA. If it keeps people away from Europe, that is defintely an upside!
Many places in Europe are overflowing with tourists – finally Europe has come up with a system to reduce greatly tourist traffic! I’ll be happy to support their effort by avoiding any European travel for the next year or so.
“Wow, exactly what a Russian spy would say”
We’ve found someone in competition with 1990.
It wasn’t too bad in FRA last week. I just thought they were being slow at first but still no more than a 15 minute wait to go with the super long walks to connect, as is normal in Frankfurt.
Lavon has been a bad airport to transit through as long as I can recall, and is one I avoid. ZRH was running very smoothly, as one would expect.
*Lisbon
Darn AI spellchecker
@Mike P — “A small step forward; a big step forward in civilization.”
I fly Ryannair out of Shengen from an airport that Ryannair was reporting 1-2 hours waits on April 30. They’ll have had some time to deal with this before my flight, so, hopefully…
But, I realized early on the stupidity of their timing: have it be required just as summer travel starts heating up. So, I had 6 hours connecting in CDG inbound (but didn’t need it). And, my flight is late afternoon out, so I can arrive 4+ hours early. And, if that’s not enough, I suspect Ryanair might delay the departure since I’ll be at the front of the queue.
Flew into MXP two days ago. The line was short but moved slowly. My fingers took three tries and then at the exit where they were to be read, which is a frequent issue for me with biometrics because one of my fingers reads oddly due to an accident as a youth). Then at the exit where passport stamping used to occur, the machine beeped and a (helpful) staff member told me that my fingerprints did not match the early read, but they could fix it there, which they did.
@This comes to mind — *Schengen (unless you meant Shenzhen, but Ryanair don’t fly there, and this post is about Europe, so… Ohio.)
One of the big problems they are not addressing is when the system goes down. I was flying British Airways and no matter how many times the moron gate person did it failed. Over and over and over again she was doing it expecting a different result. Finally they did manual checks. Thing is half of them are forgetting how to do it. Planes are late leaving, people are late getting to the gates etc.
I see the Britons picking Greece as their destination this summer.
Lisbon three weeks ago took me 3 hours to clear immigration. Porto this week took 2 hours to clear. They better figure it out.
Another reason for British citizens to regret their Brexit vote.
For all the US travelers irritated with these long lines – think about non-US travelers coming to the US. Have you seen the lines at US airports Passport control on arrival for non-US citizens? They can get VERY long and sometimes hours long at airports such as ORD and IAH. And since the Trump administration made US Green card holders go in the same line as non-US citizens – those lines are even longer and slower.
Karma is a bitch
(I’m a frequent US traveler so no bias)
Does anyone have advice for determining which airports are best to fly into for avoiding long lines from this? Are there any airports that have very few international arriving flights or other circumstances to make this easier? I feel like it is hard to tell which cities to deliberately fly through to avoid the long lines.
Rome FCO was a zoo last week. Huge queue to use the machines with very little assistance available.
I will be able to see if there are problems when summer gets here in June.
More detail: This rollout of bio was so wrong that smart Greece has waived bio for the million British tourists who visit each year. They weren’t willing to lose billions of revenue in Greece’s vital tourism industry because of the arrogence of EU bureaucrats who mandatedbio before the systems were tested and personnel trained.
Gary, question. You only have to do it once? I had done it before. Then I landed in amsterdam (a different trip) and was told I had to do it again.
Misinformation? Or?
Had a miserable experience arriving Zurich last week. Getting through immigration took over two hours. Virtually no staff helping people waiting in line. Kiosks were mostly NOT working and there was no one to direct people anywhere when that happened. Truly chaotic experience. Definitely NOT what I expected from the Swiss.
Otherwise, Swiss travel has been extremely efficient (and expensive). Heading home in two days. Not looking forward to Zurich airport again.
Heading to Portugal this summer but maybe the better course is to clear EES by entering in Germany rather than Portugal. Hopefully exiting Faro will be easier than entering. Stay tuned.