The EES is a mess

The Schengen Area has added biometrically enforced border crossing tracking through a system called the Entry/Exit System (EES). While this sounds great on paper, the rollout has been anything but great. It’s attracted a lot of negative attention. Why is this happening, and how to avoid the worst of it? Please read on to find out.

Why is it useful?

As biometric technologies have evolved in recent decades, so has each country’s desire to enforce their immigration laws with biometrics. There are several good reasons to have the EES:

• To have one central system to track foreign nationals’ movements into and out of the Schengen Area
• To catch overstayers
• To prevent identity fraud
• To prevent illegal immigration and “irregular migration”

Up until recently, the Schengen Area only had the Schengen Information System, but this allowed Schengen countries to detect arrest warrants from Interpol and other Schengen countries. It did not track each foreign national’s movement into and out of the Schengen Area.

Therefore, a system like the EES is essential to preserving the integrity of Schengen immigration law.

What’s wrong with it?

The EES conceptually is a great idea. Many countries already have such systems. The Schengen Area hasn’t been able to start one for many years because it’s much harder to get 29 countries to all unify under one procedure and one system.

Just before the EES went into operation, it seemed the European Union finally overcame all of those hurdles and was, at long last, able to implement a long-overdue Schengen-wide set of security enhancements. Unfortunately, the poor results of the EES’s implementation have only served to further underscore how hard it is to get 29 countries to do the same thing and do it well.

The EES is now responsible for unreasonably long border control waits which are causing travelers to miss their departing flights. This is particularly bad because exit immigration is supposed to be quicker than entry immigration. Something is clearly wrong with the EES.

Why did this happen?

From Brussels, the European Commission centrally planned and proposed the Entry/Exit System, in accordance with all EU regulations. The EES was meant to increase security while being compatible with each Schengen country’s own immigration requirements. However, it’s precisely because each individual Schengen country operates its own border authorities and border control systems that the EES has become nearly impossible to get right.

Before the EES was invented, each Schengen country was already handling border security technologies their own way. Almost all of them created e-gates for EU/EEA nationals, which allowed them to scan their passports and enter/exit without talking to a human. For foreign nationals, they still came up with ways to streamline the process. The Netherlands all but automated exit immigration at Amsterdam Schiphol Airport; many foreign nationals went through e-gates and only had to see the Marechaussee officer to get their obligatory exit stamp. France used the PARAFE e-gates system. And Germany allowed certain foreign nationals to use the EU/EEA citizens’ e-gates.

As you can see, the landscape of the Schengen Area’s passport control systems was already very fragmented. Only a few things were consistent:

• Schengen entry and exit stamps for foreign nationals
• The Schengen Information System was used to see if anyone trying to enter had any arrest warrants under their name
• Foreign nationals could only stay for 90 days in any 180 day rolling period, and if they overstayed, they’d be hit with a re-entry ban

Despite the systemic inconsistencies, the EU pushed through its EES proposal unrelentingly, assuming everyone would be onboard with the changes. In reality, individual Schengen member states face vastly different fiscal constraints, traffic demands, and political priorities. Even within one country, there could be inconsistent services across different airports in the country. One airport might have a reliable automated border control system set up and might be able to properly match border control staffing levels to passenger volumes. But another one might have none of those available. The situation depended on the airport and the country’s border control agency to get right, not the European Commission.

Leading up to the EES’s start date, national border authorities repeatedly warned that their physical and digital infrastructures weren’t ready. This forced the European Commission to abandon its intended grand launch in favor of an awkward, phased approach.

The EES had its “soft launch” on October 12, 2025. This soft launch period lasted until April 10, 2026. During this period, each international airport in the Schengen Area ramped up their EES systems on their own timelines. Some airports in Europe were fully capable of using EES in October 2025, but others didn’t even start setting up their EES kiosks to process passengers until early 2026. A traveler could land at an airport which didn’t have EES operational, but leave at another airport which already started taking fingerprints and completing facial recognition. In any case, travelers were still manually stamped in and out by border officials regardless if the EES was used, since the tracking was necessary for airports where EES hadn’t been set up yet.

On April 10, 2026, the EES officially launched across the Schengen Area. As of that day, all airports had to turn it on, and passport stamping was officially allowed to cease. This is when the issues started arising. Previously, border officials at the airports could say, “it’s not working, let’s just go back to stamping”. Now, they had to make it work, unless they got special permission from their country’s government to temporarily suspend the system, for mere hours at a time, during unmanageably high passenger volumes.

This operational rift was further widened by fierce pushback from major airlines and international airport groups, who openly criticized official timelines as disconnected from operational realities.

Fragmented enforcement

This lack of national alignment directly led to deeply fragmented enforcement across the Schengen Area. Under the weight of mounting queues, individual member states applied the new border mandates with wildly varying degrees of strictness. Most jurisdictions strive for full compliance, but some others (chiefly Greece and Italy) routinely invoke temporary EU flexibility rules to bypass biometric capture whenever travel rushes threatened to stall airport operations.

Stamping has stopped at some airports, while they continue to be utilized in others. This seems to not even correlate with whether the airport has suspended EES procedures. In other words, some airports both use EES and still manually stamp passports. Many airports using EES don’t stamp passports anymore, which is what’s supposed to happen. Other airports who suspend EES biometric collection temporarily stamp passports as a backup measure, but sometimes they might not stamp either.

Beyond the fact that this creates a confusing situation for passengers, this inconsistent experience also introduces a severe data asymmetry risk. Biometric entries recorded strictly at one port were sometimes followed by unrecorded exits at another port that had temporarily suspended checks to clear lines.

Whenever EES procedures are suspended at an airport, the central database may fail to register travelers departing. In those case, their EES dossier is left open, which means in the eyes of the Schengen Area, they are still within the Schengen Area! This causes law-abiding tourists and business travelers to face the real threat of being misidentified as illegal overstayers the next time they enter the Schengen Area, exposing them to unwarranted fines and travel bans on future visits.

Inconsistent checkpoint systems and procedures

Compounding these regulatory discrepancies was a near-total absence of standardized, day-to-day procedures at border checkpoints. Depending on the port of entry, a non-EU traveler’s experience could range from swift automated checks to excruciatingly slow manual processing. Some major transit hubs routed passengers through self-service kiosks to capture facial images and fingerprints before they reached a border agent, whereas smaller gateways and other unlucky major transit hubs processed everything manually at traditional booths. In the latter case, first-time EES registrants slow down the process for returning EES registrants. This wastes the time of border agents who could otherwise be spending their time processing other travelers who already have biometrics enrolled.

To make matters worse, the “Travel to Europe” mobile app, which was meant to accompany the EES, has been nearly useless. It was meant to allow all travelers entering any of the Schengen Area’s 29 countries to pre-registration details before arriving at the border. That would shave off time from completing their EES entry immigration procedures, potentially providing significant time savings. So far, only Portugal and Sweden have added support for the app. The other 27 Schengen countries don’t support this app at all. Without this pre-arrival shortcut, initial enrollment must be done on the ground. It takes on average three minutes per passenger, but with technical glitches, it often takes longer. It may seem like a small amount of additional time, but when all passengers’ clearance times are summed up together, it quickly produces multi-hour bottlenecks when several wide-body aircraft land at once.

Unique challenges with exit immigration

While entry processing attracted early public attention, exit immigration quickly became one of the system’s most disruptive failure points. Historically, departing the Schengen Area was a rapid, high-throughput step requiring little more than a quick visual passport check and stamping, or in some airports, a quick passport scan at an automated gate. The EES fundamentally shattered this dynamic by mandating biometric verification on departure, forcing system hardware to capture live facial and fingerprint data and match it against the traveler’s original entry profile in real time.

The sluggishness and friction of this biometric verification step stems from a compounding mix of technical latency, physical capture overhead, and system failure rates. Unlike reading a static passport chip, live biometric checks require instantaneous, two-way database queries between local airport gates and central EU servers, where even minor network latency halts the physical barrier. On a practical level, biometric capture frequently fails on the first attempt due to uncooperative terminal lighting, misaligned face positions, or unreadable fingerprints. Every failed match triggers mandatory retries or, in the case of unattended e-gates, forces the automated gate to lock down until a border officer conducts a manual override. Furthermore, the system must calculate the traveler’s compliance with the 90/180-day short-stay rule. If the initial entry log contains data discrepancies, the border official needs to manually work to reconcile the missing records, which adds major delays for both the affected traveler and those queuing up behind them.

Because these friction points stretch exit processing times from a customary five seconds to upwards of a minute or two per person (if not longer), outbound border zones quickly paralyze facilities operating under unyielding flight schedules. Non-EU passengers who cleared security hours in advance routinely find themselves trapped in gridlocked passport lines within sight of their boarding gates. Facing severe financial penalties for missing departure slots, airlines are frequently forced to close aircraft doors and depart on time with empty seats, leaving behind dozens of fully checked-in passengers who were stranded in exit queues.

Technical disparities

Underpinning these operational headaches was a fundamental technical divide across the continent. Rather than mandating a single, standardized tech stack across all border points, the EU allowed member states to procure equipment independently. This created a complex web of competing hardware and software solutions from different vendors, some of which perform very well and others of which constantly run into reliability issues. In the latter case, it necessitates reverting back to manual border control procedures, which completely defeats the point of EES.

International and industry backlash

News headlines across many countries are sharing the nightmarish situations being created at airports across Europe, mentioning how these delays have even caused seasoned travelers to miss their flights.

These issues pose a threat to the European tourism industry and cross-border business.

The aviation industry has vociferously expressed their opposition to continuing EES in its current state. Ryanair’s COO called the EES “half-baked” and implored the European Commission to “stop using passengers as guinea pigs”. Sadly, their pleas to suspend EES for the peak summer travel season have been dismissed by the European Commission, which has doubled down on keeping EES and improving it.

How this compares to other countries

Many other non-Schengen countries and territories, such as the United States, the United Kingdom, China (mainland), India, Japan, and Taiwan, collect biometrics (including facial recognition and fingerprints) at the border. Most of these also have dedicated kiosks to process first-time arrivals.

However, none of these countries are known for their exit immigration procedures causing their passengers to miss their flights. In fact, the United States and the United Kingdom do not even conduct manual exit immigration checks. They digitally record exits based the airline’s passenger manifest. Exit immigration from the U.S. has taken the form of machine-based facial recognition checks, which are nearly instantaneous and serve the dual purpose of acting as a biometric boarding pass.

Even entry immigration is better handled than the post-EES procedures. While the U.S. is known for notorious lines and intensity of checks for foreign nationals clearing border control procedures, it is at least predictable. Airlines will add proper padding for their passengers to be able to make their connecting flight. And, what’s perhaps underappreciated is that the U.S.’s biometrics verification system seldom breaks, if ever. It’s almost unheard of for CBP agents to say, “oh our biometrics system today isn’t working, so you can just skip that”. If it breaks though, they know exactly what procedures to follow. They don’t have to check with their peer authorities in other countries to see what to do. They just follow what the DHS leadership tells them to do, and that allows for the system to be resilient even in the face of technology failures.

The most important takeaway is that none of these countries have fragmented systems. They all operate under one unified immigration system, one set of laws, one set of rules, and one set of procedures. No infighting or bickering occurs among different states or airports; the national immigration authorities take care of things themselves.

How to avoid the EES mess

The only way to guarantee avoiding it is to avoid being in the line which subjects you to the EES.

The most obvious ways to do this are:

• Get an EU/EEA passport
• Have an EU/EEA residence permit

But that’s not an option for most visitors. So what else works?

National facilitation programmes

Another option is to use so-called “national facilitation programmes”. In a nutshell, these are individual Schengen Area member countries’ own trusted traveler programs, where pre-vetted individuals could use the same line as EU/EEA citizens and bypass traditional foreigner border checks. Such per-country programs were strictly for entering and exiting via that country, and didn’t extend to other Schengen states. Examples include Germany’s EasyPASS-RTP, the Netherlands’ Privium, etc.

A member of EasyPASS-RTP is able to enter and exit the Schengen Area using the citizens’ passport control line in Frankfurt am Main, Munich, Berlin, Düsseldorf, Hannover, etc. because these are all airports in Germany whose border control duties are run by the Bundespolizei. However, this privilege does not exist in Paris, Madrid, Milan, Rome, Amsterdam, or any other airport outside of Germany, because the other countries’ own border control agencies run things their own way.

These programs existed before the EES started operations, and were allowed to remain, albeit with modifications to satisfy EES regulations. They now operate alongside EES regulations, but continue to provide a much-needed shortcut for members of these programs.

For more information on signing up for EasyPASS-RTP, see this article: Enrolling for EasyPASS-RTP at Frankfurt Airport.

VIP treatment

Another option is to use priority lines or VIP lines available at certain airports for business class passengers, frequent flyer elites, and premium travelers. For instance, at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport, SkyTeam’s ‘Sky Priority’ status (for SkyTeam elites and business class passengers) gets you into a special border control line which has reasonable wait times and don’t exceed an hour. Other airports offer security and immigration VIP fast track services for a fee.

If none of the above apply

What can you do if you can’t use a so-called national facilitation programme, you’re not an EU/EEA citizen or residence permit holder, and you’re not flying business class? Unfortunately, the only remaining option is to pick airports that have their act together and hope for the best. There’s no authoritative list, but it’s helpful to listen to anecdotal evidence from recent travelers who braved the lines in the past few months.

What’s next?

After the rollout of EES, ETIAS was supposed to begin operations in the last quarter of 2026. This has been postponed in light of the numerous issues EES faces. Adding an additional layer of complexity to an already struggling system would cause unbearable chaos at the border.

We can all only hope that Brussels gets their act together. In the meantime, finding suitable mitigating strategies is the best bet for those who must travel to the Schengen Area.