The European Union's Entry Exit System increased average border-processing time for UK nationals at Rome's Fiumicino airport from seven minutes to 20, according to the airport's chief aviation officer. [1] That is a measured local slowdown of nearly three times. It is not a European average and does not mean every traveler waited 20 minutes.
The system requires non-EU citizens entering the 29-country Schengen area to register fingerprints and a photograph, with the information checked on departure. It has been phased in since October through kiosks, electronic gates and border officers. Children must use staffed processing under rules that differ by country and age. [1]
Fiumicino spent €12 million on standalone kiosks but found them impractical for large passenger volumes. The airport then allowed eligible UK nationals to register biometrics at e-gates. Ivan Bassato, its chief aviation officer, said the integration improved performance significantly, yet processing still rose from seven to 20 minutes. [1] Implementation improved without restoring the old baseline.
The anecdotes are worse. One family arriving in Rome reported a two-hour queue with young children, while an American couple described an hour-long wait and a missed driver. Travelers arriving through Barcelona reported waits near an hour and machines that were not working. [1] Those experiences show real harm. They do not reveal the distribution across all arrivals or airports.
Ryanair has called the rollout failed and advised passengers to allow extra time. The European Commission says disruption is limited at most EU airports and promises continued support. [1] Both frames can coexist with Fiumicino's number: a local system can nearly triple measured time while most airports avoid the worst anecdotes. The missing evidence is a comparable continental table.
Faro airport illustrates the variability. Its border-control superintendent said a queue that once took 10 minutes could exceed 30, though waits above an hour were rare and could occur when more aircraft than expected arrived together. He also described EU server bugs that could affect several countries at once, while saying such failures were becoming less frequent. [1]
Useful comparison requires more than a stopwatch. Airports should publish the baseline period, sample size, arrival volume, nationality mix and staffing behind each figure. Kiosk, e-gate and server failure rates matter. So do manual-processing rules for children, accessibility support, simultaneous flight banks and the number of missed connections.
Children expose the design problem particularly clearly. At Rome, children under 12 cannot use the new e-gate route and must see an officer; in Portugal, the staffed threshold described by BBC is under 16. [1] A family queue can therefore behave differently from an adult queue even on the same flight. A headline average that omits household composition can hide the travelers least able to absorb a long wait.
The power to suspend the system under exceptional circumstances adds another stage. Airports and airlines sought authority to suspend it proactively during busy periods, but an EU meeting earlier this month produced no change. [1] A permitted fallback is not the same as its use, and a request for broader discretion is not evidence that every queue warrants suspension.
The practical advice is modest: travelers should budget more time. The policy judgment needs stronger evidence. Fiumicino has supplied one operating denominator and an account of attempted remediation. Europe has not yet supplied airport-by-airport throughput, outages and passenger consequences. One airport can disprove complacency without proving continent-wide collapse.
-- CHARLES ASHFORD, London