The EU has delayed ETIAS indefinitely as airports struggle with long lines and technical problems following the rollout of the Entry/Exit System (EES).
The European Union has a new estimated start date for the ETIAS system: TBD.
ETIAS, or the European Travel Information and Authorization System, is a planned system that would require travelers from outside the EU to register for a travel authorization before boarding their flights. It was designed to be implemented once the bloc’s automated Entry Exit System (EES) was fully in place over the summer.
The rollout of EES, however, has been something of a disaster. Phased in over the slower winter travel season, and completely cut over on April 10, the system has been notoriously slow, causing hours-long waits in many airports across the EU.
On paper, the system makes sense. Calculating eligibility to enter the EU for most travelers is easily automated. The idea is that the EU collects biometrics, like a face scan and fingerprints, during the first border crossing, then stores them, allowing for faster processing using automated scanners on future visits.
In my personal experience, that’s not how it worked. I’ve entered the EU four times since the cutover, and it was a decidedly mixed bag in how the system worked. At Amsterdam in April, the system was easy: I visited a kiosk, had my passport, fingerprints, and face scanned using an automated terminal, and I was on my way. The whole thing took about five minutes, including the wait in line.
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My next entry in Frankfurt two months later was a slow-rolling mess. They’re only using the automated gates for EU citizens—everyone else must wait for a border guard to process their entry manually. On my first entry at Frankfurt in June, the wait was well over an hour, and I missed my connecting flight. On my second entry in July, there was just a five-minute wait, which I chalked up to my flight arriving at a luckily quiet hour. However, my biometrics were collected again, each time, in spite of them already being in the system.
Confoundingly, they also have a “pre-registration” kiosk in Frankfurt for you to provide your biometrics ahead of time to speed everything up. You’d think that gets you to a bypass lane of some sort, but it doesn’t—you go right into the gen pop lane with everyone else, just at the end of a longer line since you made the extra stop and not everyone else did. To add insult to injury, it was completely pointless—my biometrics were taken again by the border guard.
It was in Paris CDG where the EES system was the easiest. There was no line, no biometric collection, and the automated system worked perfectly. The only bummer in Paris is if you’re connecting to another flight, the French don’t trust anybody else’s airport security, and you have to go through again before proceeding to the EES checkpoint (this isn’t required in Frankfurt or Amsterdam).
The bigger mess, in most cases, seemed to be leaving.
At Munich in July, the lines for the EES checkpoint snaked all the way down the corridor. They clearly weren’t ready. Frustratingly, the premium lanes for elite frequent fliers and premium cabin travelers were also closed, and when I told the helper in the area my flight was boarding at that very moment, she directed me to an automated checkpoint, which had no line.
The problem with that, however, was that Munich appears to be using a hybrid system. The automated gates seem to work as a holding pen, scanning your passport and biometrics and then keeping travelers captive so they don’t overwhelm the two border agents working the six gates. Once I reached the border agent after being held in limbo for several minutes, they scanned my passport, but it took another several minutes for the system to pull anything up. “The system is slow today,” the border guard said apologetically.
Departing from Amsterdam, the line wasn’t as horrendous as it had been in April, but there were again only about four slow-moving automated gates to process hundreds of travelers, and the gates were terribly finicky, not liking when passengers tried to enter them with, well, luggage, thinking more than one person was inside the gate, and slowing down the whole process.
I later learned that airports in Paris and Amsterdam have switched off biometric collection after asking the EU for help processing their crowds of passengers. The EU has issued a waiver for biometric collection until September 6, but many countries where airport wait times have ballooned have asked for the waiver to be extended.
Many other countries around the world, including Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, and the United Kingdom, use similar systems at border crossings, but what makes the EES different is its sheer scale. The system is designed to be used across the Schengen Area, which comprises 29 countries (EU members Cyprus and Ireland are not part of the Schengen Area).
Last month, the European Chapter of the Airports Council International (ACI) asked the EU to allow countries to completely suspend EES if needed to get passengers moving, but the bloc has so far been reluctant to do so.
With all of this still up in the air, it’s not only prudent that the EU indefinitely suspend implementation of ETIAS, it’s necessary.