To ask for your Easter holiday airport stories - new passport control system/strikes/fuel chaos or pretty chill?

[CurdinHenry]

I stayed at home because I was scared but hope dozens of people are now going to tell me it was all ok

I know it's been over hyped (even in the mail!!!). We need to do the fucking thing every time

@Georgiepud ..I'm flying to Nice tomorrow...are they using EES ? I'm always queuing for ages for manual stamping

2 hours to get through passport control on arrival at Marco Polo Venice last week.

I guess they feel there's little point employing extra staff at airports to process the EES, until the system is fully up and running.

Large queues at Alicante. Despite having what we thought was plenty of time we caught our flight by the skin of our teeth after the new readers failed to recognise daughters passport and fingerprints. She had to join another queue for manual control which was full of people rejected by the new tech. I got through ok.

Went to Venice… didn’t take much extra time BUT on the way in we registered on EES for the first ever time, then we went through the gates and then joined a queue for a manual check who also wanted fingerprints and iris scan!! Same on the way home 🤷‍♀️ It didn’t take long but it’s just added an extra layer. My fingerprints and iris scan were taken 3 separate times each way!

Chaos at Las Palmas (gran Canaria).

The queue for people with children was an hour long. I’m not sure how those using the gates fared.

I don’t know how you are expected to get through the airport, if you cannot check your bags until two hours before the flight, need to clear security and also make it through passport control - and be at the gate often as much as an hour before the flight.

A real problem for people with children already having to go through manual passport control - with even longer queues, it is just absolute misery. They must find a better solution, having lots of small children having to spend hours standing in queues is no good.

Also - the passport control was just before the gate and with no other facilities once through.

I have an EU passport so usually take my husband and children through the European queue. Is that no longer possible?

I have an EU passport and could enter the EU country via the EU queue…. but upon departure there was just a queue for anyone with a child under 12 / unable to use the e-gates, no EU priveleges.

Went to iceland and breezed through in minutes both ways. That said, we made damn sure we were front of the queue, and the guys behind us on the way home had missed their flight the day before due to passport queues

Yep standard Faro 2 years ago

We had long delays entering Portugal on Easter Sunday morning via Lisbon airport. We are not British, but even the EU queue was huge and slow (all passports being checked by staff), and from talking to non-EU people who’d been on our flight later on, they’d taken 2.5 hours to clear passport control. No problems when we left, though.

My tip would be to go to the loo before joining the queue.

No, unless your family members have residency cards. Although, being the only one in the family that doesn’t have an EU passport, I’ve never gone through passport control with them, always gone through the non-EU queue.

Went through Stockholm this weekend, fingerprinted and photographed at the passport control desk by the immigration officer on the way in. Once the EU passport holders and airline staff were through, they opened all the booths to non-EU passengers - 10 booths in all so it was really quick. No kiosks to register before joining the queue for passport control though.

Also fingerprinted and photographed on the way out, plus had to show my boarding pass (which I don’t recall ever having to do at passport control before). Still very quick, but only about 7 or 8 people in the queue ahead of me.

It does sound like you’ll end up being photographed and fingerprinted every time, plus different systems at different airports, so I can see this taking a long time to bed in.

It was very bad on arrival at Las Palmas (Gran Canaria) on 26th March. 7 UK flights had landed in the 50 minutes before ours from Newcastle. We were kept on the plane for 40 mins, then on buses for another 15, then queued for ages in the terminal, queue snaking round the whole place.

Families with young kids seemed to fair especially badly, lots of very unhappy people stood with fractious todllers. Some staff trying to help, but some very grumpy. Not pleasant!

On our return, we got there really early and went straight through passport control, took about 10 mins, but watched the queue build up as people arrived later. It's very off putting and there isn't really much you can do to help yourself - we took snacks, water, been to toilet etc. My summer trip is to Portugal!

Murcia had no queues at all, but they seem to have implemented the machines early as I registered back in February and had to just scan in and have passport stamped since then. When I entered last on Easter Monday there was no passport stamping, just waved through.

It’s not an iris scan, it’s just a photo

I flew from Gatwick to Egypt - all fine, quick process there and back. Very quick at Gatwick now you don’t have to take our electrical items and liquids and can leave them in the bag.

I flew long haul via Madrid. The flights were bought as separate tickets (cheaper that way) so I ended up going through the automatic system (scan passport, take fingerprints and photo) 4 times altogether.

Lots of machines and I hardly queued at all.

The new system this thread is talking about is to enter the EU. Egypt isn’t in the EU.

Chaos at Palma de Mallorca on 31st. 4 planes landed within minutes of each other, 3 deplaned at the same time straight into the area where people were queuing to depart. Waited in a snaking queue in departures for 1 hour before being moved into the arrivals area with the new EES screens for another hour. The 4th plane we found out later was stuck on the tarmac with passengers for an hour before deplaning.

Leaving on 11th was better, but still saw huge queues from arriving planes

We travelled from Stansted to Valencia - absolutely no problems.

This is what I'd been waiting to find out, thankyou: we're all going to have to do the whole sequence every time??

Travelled to Copenhagen, arriving there pretty late at night (10pm ish), tiny queue took hardly any time

returning via Schiphol didn’t do any EES stuff but there was a slow-ish passport queue, maybe half an hour. Annoyingly if you have kids under 14 you are not allowed use the e-gates which had a fast moving queue

on the plus side, arriving at Manchester airport, where e-gates are available to all aged 10+, is now super quick for British or EU passport holders

Faro has always been difficult, nothing to do with EES though I’m sure it doesn’t help

This was possible at Tenerife on Friday, however there was one EU desk that could process under 12s, and one family non-EU queue that could. 12s and over EU, and 12s and over non-EU could use the machines but this wasn’t clear, the EU lane wasn’t clear and there was just one long massive queue. It was a shambles. Thankfully our flight waited for all to get through and took off two hours late, so arrived at airport around 1130 for a 1345 flight (TUI transfer) and took off 1545 and queued around three hours.