I find it amusing that such headlines always include, “with young children” as if it makes the situation worse. Young kids couldn’t care less, as long as there’s a place to run around and stuff to eat.
I guess such headlines are playing on the sympathy/pity for the parents having to deal with young kids in such situation.
They should focus more on older people having to wait. We’re more impatient, the airport chairs kill our backs, and the bathrooms tend to be gross when there are too many children around.
It’s The Daily Mail, headlines like this are that newspapers bread and butter. I flew from the UK to Europe on Thursday 9th April, a day before the complete roll out. The EES was fully in place at my arrival airport and had been in use since October 2025, when the progressive roll out of EES first started. It took me less than 5 minutes to register with EES and another 10 to clear passport control.
Other, perhaps more reputable news sources, have not carried stories about long delays. I’m sure there have been some airports with queues for hours, but these are probably outliers and not the norm. It may be fair to say that The Daily Mail caters to British Europhobes.
What are the reported causes of the delays? London Heathrow is in the list, but EES isn’t used there and won’t be.
What percentage of passengers have missed flights due to delays out of the total # flying into or out of Europe? News outlets are always going top pick up the worst cases.
I travelled by Eurostar on Monday to Brussels, then on to Cologne. Just had my passport stamped at the Eurostar terminal. They’re not yet ready with the biometrics
I wouldn’t consider that either a particular reputable, or reliable source. It’s clickbait headlines trying to catastrophise the introduction of EES. There are glitches for sure and some are significantly impacting a small proportion of travellers. But, it’s not a disaster, no one is dying and I’m sure the situation will improve.
I don’t understand why you keep dismissing these snafus, reported by a bunch of outlets and on social media. The head of Ryanair has come out against the troubled rollout, for instance.
It’s no surprise to me, having experienced the soft rollout myself and seen firsthand how illogically it was run. I’d predicted this and it didn’t take anything but common sense to see.
I saw the BBC article yesterday and I agree it’s more clickbait. You can’t avoid the delays, you can to a certain extent mitigate but not much more. If you’ve got a long line of numpties in front of you there’s nothing you can do about that.
Michael O’Leary the head of Ryanair is notorious for his sound bites, he’s ranked of one of the most disliked persons in the UK and Ireland. He doesn’t empathise at all, just tells people to ‘suck it up’. Here are two quotes from him, many would be deleted from this forum ““We think passengers who forget to print their boarding passes should pay €60 for being so stupid.” '“One thing we have looked at is maybe putting a coin slot on the toilet door… I would wipe their bums for a fiver.”
There are plenty of airports where EES is working fine, the # and % of travellers significantly impacted is small. It is not universal, if it were then it would be a SNAFU. What’s normal is a few minutes added delay at most airports in Schengen, but that isn’t ever going to make any headlines.
The airlines are screeching because where there are some long delays it’s affecting operations, mainly crew hours. That’s the reason why the EasyJet plane departed nearly empty from Milan.
Common sense is an oxymoron, it’s far from widespread. Wouldn’t it be more sensible to expect problems for a new system being introduced across 29 countries? The very reason that there was a limited introduction in October 2025 and an increase in January this year.
I’ve also experienced using EES and it was a doddle, a few minutes is all it took me.
Common sense: Do the math. Even if everything worked perfectly, a few minutes multiplied by hundreds of passengers on one flight, much more if multiple flights, means significantly longer wait times.
And who’s reporting that things are going swimmingly? Which airports? That actually would be news.
At the Italy soft launch, they were only randomly selecting travelers to go through the process and I had to use three separate e-kiosks to process through (redundancy for no apparent reasons), plus a human border agent at the end. And where I was at the last kiosk stage, several kiosks were offline and rebooting forever, so we were all funneled through one remaining one that worked. It was a joke.
Businesses are typically run based on efficiency and forecasts, and flights are scheduled way in advance. Common sense math could’ve predicted all the delays, even without the joke of bureaucratic inefficiencies. If they learned anything at soft launch, that would be even a bigger laugh.
Find me a news outlet that reports good news, they are few and far between. News tends to focus on bad stuff. We’re never going to see a headline “queues of less than 5 minutes at ……… for EES”.
What’s the total # of passengers using EES each day? It’s millions. Do the maths now and see what % have missed flights.
When I arrived in Europe last week there were no queues for EES registration and all the booths appeared to be working. Plus, I noticed staff on standby to help.
I suspect that most airports in Europe where EES is in use are functioning just fine, perhaps with small delays.
I’d be surprised if by the end of April things haven’t settled down and significant delays become even rarer. Considering the scale and complexity of EES, 29 countries and who knows how many ports of entry, I suspect that the design and implementation authority are pretty pleased with the introduction.
Reminds me of a tour guide I had in Korea decades ago. Complained that no one was reporting that all the other bridges were working fine, after one had collapsed.
BTW, anticipating snafus like this, I look for direct flights (so no chance of connecting delays) or, when forced to connect, look for long layovers. That way, I buffer myself and if things go swimmingly I enjoy a leisurely meal and some airport browsing and people watching. Probably other proactive travelers are doing similarly, helping to avoid missing flights.
Luckily for me, I was arriving in Italy and wasn’t in a rush. It would’ve been needlessly stressful if connecting to another flight, train or such.
It maybe that I’m less affected by queues/lines than many and that’s possibly from being a soldier, where waiting around was often the order of the day. Hurry up and wait as we used to say. I do empathise with families who are travelling with young children, older travellers who might be a little inform and those that need assistance. It would be nice to see those categories of travellers being expedited, but I don’t think that is happening.
Also, my forum pseudonym is Flaneur, the isn’t an exact English equivalent. Perhaps stroller is the nearest, someone who isn’t in a rush.
