Anyone been abroad recently and can advise about finger print checks at airports?

There are kiosks where you input all your information then it does the face scan, and then fingerprints (or other way around)

It took me about fifteen minutes and I am a klutz in my sixties.

Edited for typo

Went through Tenerife in March and no queues either way though had got there early. Stansted on the other hand was incredibly crowded and slow.

Thing is we always hear about the horror stories as a normal experience is not news. It depends where you fly to but where we went they had machines before the border and you add your details there and then are “registered” and go through that Q. However I don’t know about travelling with young children as mine are older

it does depend on the size of the airport though for sure

Went to Croatia at the start of June. Barely any queue at all, both on arrival and coming back. Waiting 5 minutes, max.

All fine here except my Ds is 12 so is supposed to go through the automatic gates as the family lane is for under 12s but they didn’t work for him. But annoying but no major delay.

It depends on the airport really. We went to Barcelona a few weeks ago and once we landed it took an hour getting through passport checks, we had 3 young DC with us so it was a pain but then the return was really quick and we waited no more than 10 minutes (they do passport checks just before the gate). Family went to Greece last week and they waited a bit longer than usual on arrival but fine on the way home. I’d give it a bit more time to be safe if you’re worried but the queue on arrival was worse than coming home for us.

I went to Tenerife in June and we arrived at about 9:30pm and it took about 20 mins to get through the fingerprint part but it meant that as soon as we got the the baggage carousel, all the bags were ready to collect.

Some airports are doing better than others. We went away in May (not Balearics). When we landed, we walked straight up to the desk. People at the back of the queue waited maybe 15-20 mins.

Going home, we queued for about 1 hour as there were a bunch of flights going to UK at similar times. They then started calling flights in order, so actually we could have skipped most of the queue. We only arrived at the airport 2 hours before.

Some destinations are not managing as well, e.g. not proactively calling forward people on specific flights, not enough staff. It also depends how many non-EU flights land at a similar time.

I went on a Thursday and I’m led to believe that Thursday and Sunday’s are the worst. Others I know have been since me and got through much quicker on later arrivals

I went to Lanzarote in March this year. The queues were pretty horrendous but they were calling families with young children to the front and letting them go ahead

I did them in April and yesterday and flew through both times. There were separate queues for families and the queue moved quickly although I had managed to be fairly close to the front both times, which I think helped. Good luck!