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You know those long wait lines at European airports that keep popping up on your Instagram feed?

Beyond just a minor inconvenience for some travelers, this has become a widespread phenomenon, even prompting airport officials to beg for help.

Due to Europe’s newly launched Entry/Exit System (commonly abbreviated as EES), new arrivals to the EU must be fingerprinted and have their faces scanned before proceeding to the usual passport control.

The issue is that most European airports weren’t prepared for the logistical nightmare of this new requirement, and now passengers are facing wait times of up to 5 hours at some entry points.

Lisbon Airport is particularly bad right now.

Now, the European Commission is being formally asked to suspend EES to allow airports and airlines to deal with the rapidly deteriorating situation:

European Airports On The Verge Of Collapse

Airlines and airports across the EU have addressed a formal letter to Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, requesting permission to suspend EES registration ahead of the peak travel season.

We’re still only in early July, when summer travel is only picking up, and airlines and hubs already get overwhelmed in August, with understaffing and longer flight delays observed each year. Add mandatory fingerprinting to that, and you get a recipe for disaster.

The European Commission rolled out EES to tighten border checks and ensure travelers comply with the Schengen Area’s travel rules.

Schengen comprises over 30 European countries today, and as a U.S. passport holder, you are only allowed to stay across the Schengen territory for up to 90 days out of any 180-day period.

Prior to EES, compliance checks were typically carried out by border officers upon verifying entry and exit stamps manually.

With EES, entry and exit times in the Schengen Area are automatically recorded every time a traveler uses a kiosk when landing or leaving.

Sounds great on paper, until you’re dealing with reality on the ground:

This Is How EES Has Transformed Travel In Europe… For The Worse

Snaking lines, EES kiosks that simply don’t work, and hours-long wait times are making non-European travelers, Americans included, reconsider their travel plans.

In May, French police temporarily suspended extra checks at the port of Dover, which handles ferry crossings from Britain, to ease the influx of passengers, and just last week, the head of Rome’s airports threatened to suspend EES to avoid ‘disaster’ over the summer.

The entire country of Greece considered suspending EES for British travelers, its main non-EU market, to deal with the border bottlenecks, before getting scolded by Brussels and ordered to reinstate EES.

Yep, the whole thing’s a mess, but you don’t need to stress out and rack your brain trying to make sense of it all by yourself.

If you’re headed to Europe this summer, use the Entry Requirement Checker for a full checklist of all the requirements and documentation you need before you fly.

What Is The European Commission Doing To Mitigate The Problems?

At this moment, not… very… much.

They’ve pushed for EES for years, and it’s one of those long-running pet projects the bureaucrats behind it won’t easily admit defeat on, especially with all the millions of euros spent and the entire overhaul of the continent’s immigration system to accommodate the fingerprinting facilities.

It’s a very slim chance they’ll backtrack on it.

The European Commission has loosened things a bit since, allowing countries to skip some of the checks at critical hours, but excessive lines keep on forming regardless, according to the letter penned by industry officials.

“This is undermining Europe’s reputation,” the group states. “Passengers have already been forced to queue for extended periods outside terminal buildings and on exposed aprons because border control facilities cannot process arrivals quickly enough.”

The flexibility period is set to expire in September, when the rules to allow airports to skip some checks should be limited to ‘clearly defined exceptional circumstances’, but even that has airports panicking and scrambling for options. There won’t be enough time.

Americans Should Prepare For Massive Delays

This summer, they’re expected to handle 40 million more passengers between July and August than in the previous two months, and they claim there’s no way EES will run smoothly until there is enough staff to make the system work, and the EES kiosks are ‘sufficiently reliable’.

As we stated previously, sometimes they just… go offline.

The European Commission is yet to respond.

If you’re American and you’re landing in Europe this summer, you should be prepared for the worst:

• Avoid short flight connections (keeping in mind EES registration can severely delay your entry)
• Do not faff around when leaving the plane. Toilet can wait: just run straight to the nearest EES machine before lines start forming like your life depends on it
• Download the Travel to Europe app and pre-register your travel information in advance for smoother entry (only available in Portugal and Sweden at the minute)
• Consider traveling to EES-exempt countries for the time being until the situation is resolved (here are 5 countries where fingerprinting rules do not apply)
• Keep using the Entry Requirement Checker to stay up to date with the ever-changing regulations

Vinicius Costa

Vini, our senior lead writer at Travel Off Path, has over 60+ countries under his belt (and currently weaving tales from Paris!), and a knack for turning off-the-beaten-path experiences into informative stories that will have you packing your bags.