I had no issues with Europe’s disastrous new entry system – I skipped it

May 18, 2026 — 5:00am

I wasn’t looking forward to landing at Rome’s Fiumicino Airport last Wednesday night. In the run-up to peak visitor season, at many airports across mainland Europe, incoming passengers were experiencing huge wait times to clear immigration. At airports in Athens, Geneva and Paris, some passengers waited up to three hours in immigration queues before they could pass through to the baggage carousels, and Rome’s Fiumicino Airport was one of the worst.

It was approaching midnight when our Turkish Airlines flight landed and we marched through Fiumicino’s silent Terminal 1. Noticeable since my last visit a year ago were the huge banks of Entry/Exit System (EES) kiosks that had been installed along the walls, but they were all roped off. We had expected these kiosks to process our entry, but instead we were shunted through a chicane and on to a booth where an immigration official stamped my passport after a cursory glance. Within 15 minutes of leaving the aircraft, I was in the baggage claim area.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. If the Schengen Area’s EES was working as planned, between October 12, 2025, when the system began, and full implementation on April 10, 2026, on first arrival in the Schengen Area travellers who did not need a visa to enter the area would have their fingerprints and image recorded. That biometric data would then be linked to the European Travel Information and Authorisation System (ETIAS), the pre-travel authorisation (with a fee) that will soon be required for visa-free visitors from countries such as Australia, Britain, the US and Canada.

ETIAS is the central plank in a broader EU border modernisation project known as Smart Borders. Once introduced, it will allow approved travellers to enter the Schengen Area through digital scanners, similar to Australia’s SmartGates system. ETIAS is scheduled to be up and running in the last quarter of 2026, following years of delays.

The reason the EES is failing

The EES was designed to record the fingerprints and image of non-European travellers who are entitled to enter the EU without a visa. That classification applies to citizens from more than 60 countries. In 2025, EU countries recorded 793 million international tourist arrivals, many of those from those 60-plus countries that do not require a visa. This year, when the number of visitor arrivals began ramping up, the EES keeled over in some of Europe’s busiest airports, unable to cope with the volume of traffic.

Millions of travellers are likely to enter the continent in the time-honoured way, standing in long queues waiting for a border official to stamp their passport and wave them through.

A large part of the blame for that failure can be attributed to the fingerprinting process. Fingerprinting is slow and problematic. Having been fingerprinted at immigration desks in South Africa, India and the United States, it’s never been a smooth process. First-time registrations can take several minutes per traveller. Multiply that by the 300-plus passengers arriving from a wide-body jet, then multiply that by the number of such aircraft arriving at a busy airport, and you have many thousands of passengers arriving each hour. Adding to the chaos, many scanners have reportedly failed to capture fingerprints.

Quite a few elderly travellers and children require personal assistance, and when a few kiosks fail, even at an airport with numerous kiosks, queues soon develop. Adding to the meltdown, governments and airports did not anticipate the scale of the new system. In general, they failed to provide additional border control staff to deal with fingerprinting, and software failures took a number of kiosks out of action.

Despite the problems, no European country has formally abandoned the EES. So far, Italy is the only nation to fully suspend its implementation until September 30, 2026. Several other countries, including Spain and Portugal, have relaxed enforcement during busy periods. But May is just the start of Europe’s peak visitor season. Unless staffing levels and software problems are addressed quickly, expect many millions of travellers to enter the Schengen Area this northern summer without having their digital identity recorded.

What this means for the implementation of the ETIAS

The EES and ETIAS are designed to work together. The EES records the movement of non-EU travellers entering and leaving the Schengen Area, replacing passport stamps. ETIAS is a pre-travel authorisation required for visa-free visitors, similar to the ESTA visa waiver system that applies to Australian tourists entering the US. EES affects you at the border, ETIAS applies before you travel. But ETIAS requires biometric data to ensure smooth processing without human supervision. Without reliable biometric matching from the EES database, ETIAS cannot function effectively. Once ETIAS is introduced, anyone applying for ETIAS authorisation who has not had their biometric data captured will still need to be fingerprinted and photographed on their first entry to the Schengen Area.

ETIAS has had a long and difficult gestation. The EU first announced plans to introduce a visa waiver system in 2016, with an initial launch of 2021. That was pushed back to 2022, then May 2023, and as that date approached, to May 2025. Given so many false starts, it will be no surprise if ETIAS fails to launch in the last quarter of 2026.

The vision of seamless, automated entry for trusted travellers that lies at the heart of Smart Borders may eventually work. Meanwhile, the reality at many European airports over this northern summer will be very different.

Millions of travellers are likely to enter the continent in the time-honoured way, standing in long queues, waiting for a border official to stamp their passport and wave them through.