“Registration for EES was well organised with minimal delays,” reports reader Brian Hartley from Palma airport. “However, my wife and I had different experiences at the registration system. She had to give fingerprints but I was directed to an eGate on a passport and facial scan, no fingerprints.”
The Hartleys’ arrival for their holiday in Mallorca sums up European frontier roulette – in which a spin of some bureaucratic wheel decides the kind of border control experience you will have under the new EU entry-exit system.
As the peak travel season for the Mediterranean gets underway – with many new routes starting this weekend – I can offer some fresh travel advice for Europe.
- Be prepared for range of border-crossing experiences. You might have your fingerprints and a facial biometric taken on the way in, and on the way out; don’t protest that you have already been through this palaver multiple times.
- On the other hand, at some airports if you say you have already registered your digits and visage, you might be able to swerve through the eGates, pausing momentarily to frown at the camera, and be on the beach or in the bar before you know it.
- Meanwhile at the Port of Dover, the Eurotunnel terminal at Folkestone, Greece and who-knows-where else, just hand over your passport so the details can be skimmed from the machine readable strip on the photo page.
In short: “Welcome to Europe – welcome to frontier roulette.”
I contend that is a fair assessment of the reality prevailing this summer. The sooner the European Union acknowledges the entry-exit system is the ultimate in bureaucratic over-promising and under-delivering, the better. We can then all get on with looking forward to our trips. Befuddling euro-permutations of digital borders should not distract us from the prize: landscapes and seascapes, culture, cuisine and hundreds of millions of friendly locals.
My plan on Wednesday is to travel to the fine French resort of Deauville in Normandy, south of the mouth of the Seine. Reaching the place from London by rail and ferry in a reasonable time for a fair price proved beyond me. So instead I have paid £35 for an easyJet flight to Rennes in Brittany, another €10 for a bus to Caen provided by that well-known coach company, French Railways, and I will make it up from there.
Ringing in my ears as I line up at passport control in Rennes will be the words of my friend and fellow scrutineer of European legislation (yes, we should both get out more), Dr Nick Brown: “Arguably EES is entirely irrelevant for the traveller. You get on a plane, you arrive in country X, you do passport control (or rather, passport control is done to you).
“The entry-exit system is simply the new way of doing passport control to people. I guess it makes sense to have branding around it for internal consumption, but if all the EU had announced to the public was ‘border checks are changing’ that would have been fine.”
Nick has a worry, though, about the next stage in the grand European border project: the European Travel Information and Authorisation System (Etias). This permit scheme will require some action on behalf of the traveller in advance of the journey.
Nick says: “They have pushed EES so hard that Etias – which passengers actually do have to know and care about – will be in second place when it comes to the ‘Can I be bothered?’ space in their minds.” Actually, he used a different word than “bothered”.
Ryanair has joined the fray, writing to all 29 EES countries, urging them to suspend EES until September to “ensure smooth airport operations for passengers this summer”.
Neal McMahon, chief operations officer for Europe’s biggest budget airline, says: “Governments across Europe are attempting to roll out a half-baked IT system in the middle of the busiest travel season of the year, and passengers are paying the price, being forced to endure hours long passport control queues and in some cases, missing flights.”
Meanwhile, try to relax as you approach the border – and let me know how the frontier roulette wheel spins for you. s@hols.tv
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