To find travel in Europe too stressful now with all the extra passport palaver

[Pavementworrier]

Why do all these new systems work so poorly? Who is getting rich on the stupid shit eye scanner things?

Please tell me soothing tales of recent visits to Europe where it was fine.

In Estonia last week there were only machines for EU citizens. They were very quick. The non-EU citizens need to go through the manned booths and an incredibly slow palaver of eye scanning and finger print taking which mostly didn't seem to work. Or took multiple attempts. Some people had to have their photo taken with a phone instead.

Stamp stamp tantrum tantrum is exactly what you are doing though, i mean canceling a trip because you think it isn't going to go your way and you might pee yourself is quite, petulant.

Thanks, ExpatDaughter!

flew from UK to Budapest just before Christmas and it was fine. There were 6 staff in the queue doing the eye scan and fingerprints before we got to the manned booth where our (UK) passports were stamped. Coming back, we just used the automatic gates as usual. Not an issue.

3 mins extra for my whole party to go through - and tbh that included the passport stamp as well which I think is going eventually isn’t it?

But 3 mins extra per party is potentially much longer extra queueing time if there is not significant extra provision.

As I described above, when entering estonia last week the extra time per person/party was prob "only" 2-5 minutes. But multiply that by 10 people/parties in front of you in the queue it is quite a lot of extra time! My EU family members got though about 30 mins quicker than me. We've never had that big a difference before and we travel a few times a year. And that was when it was relatively quiet.

There was no problem returning to the UK.

It was all very smooth and quick flying into Venice (Marco Polo) at the end of November. Scan passport and fingerprints, answer questions on the screen about money and hotel. Move to the other queue, through the egates, and then passport stamped at the kiosk and on the way.

Would probably be a bit more chaotic at a bigger airport with multiple flights arriving at once.

We flew into Turin on 21 Jan - there were well over 25 terminals for fingerprint and questions and then virtually no queue for stamping bit. So actually quite a lot faster than our last airport experience. DD for some reason took ages, but our bags still not appeared by the time she got to us. So no delays overall.

Did you then travel back in time 9 days to post this?

EU citizens do not use the EES machines - what you saw in Estonia were probably e-gates, which are something entirely different.

EES kiosks/booths are for non-EU citizens and not all airports have them up and running yet.

Well fingers crossed that improves things, because it was incredibly inefficient in Tallinn.

bit of a long queue but that was just because there were a lot of families on the plane and kids can’t go through the gates.

Without the family you mean.

Thank fuck for that.

I’ve been spending a week a month in Spain since July (family issues), last trip in late December.

At an admittedly smaller airport the initial registration was fairly quick and since then the process has been very similar to the automated gates to re-enter the UK with no significant queues. It may be different in larger Spanish airports I guess but the tech will be the same and seems to be working reasonably well.

So you did vote for brexit then, thought so from your tone and attitude.

Christ on a bike

Can you read?

The new rules only apply to non EU countries. Ireland and Cyprus are not in Schenhen but are in the EU so they go in the EU line as normal without the additional checks.

It applied to non EU countries. EU countries not in Schengen ( Ireland, Cyprus) are not affected. If UK was still in the EU these rules would not apply.

No you wouldn't, this applies to non EU counties.

Took 26 kids through one in November with no issues xx

I travelled to Greece in June (Athens) and it was all completely normal.

That's impressive

The problem is Schengen travel area trying to get into Ireland with only ID because that's how they travel around their common travel area, except UK of course who have a common travel area with Ireland.

Nothing changes for EU citizens entering Ireland, they can enter with a valid passport or national ID card.

The new rules were not in effect in June.

People are being constructive. In general they are saying they haven’t found travelling at the moment that much worse than normal, and that a trip through a small airport at low season maybe a good idea so you have got your initial registration with the new system done.

There is only one person virtually stamping their feet and having a tantrum on this thread. Why are you being so unpleasant to everyone?

in terms of needing the toilet in the queue, if I could see the queue was really slow moving and I wasn’t likely to get through it in the next half hour, I would just leave my place in the queue and go back to use the toilet, returning to my place with my family afterwards.