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

[mimimoo2]

We have a package holiday booked to one of the Balearic Islands for next week. I’ve heard lots of horror stories about the new finger print checks at passport control and how they are taking hours. Has anyone been away recently and encountered this? No info from Tui about this (not that I’ve seen anyway) but we have a late flight going out and back and worried about the dc if it’s true we’ll be waiting in line for hours on arrival. Do we need to be at the airport much earlier coming back as well?

Ah wait, is this a thing at EU airports for non-EU passport holders? From previous posts it sounded like something at some UK airports as people mentioned Luton and Manchester which confused me as I’ve never seen it at LHR or LCY.

I always used the EU line when flying into the EU.

It's enough to put you off going away.

Our delays were getting IN to Prague and Frankfurt.
We were fine leaving those places to get back to the UK.

The machines themselves are quite fast and there are a lots of them.

But for the life of me I don't understand the double checks and double queue.

I think it depends largely on how many flights have just landed from outside the EU. I arrived in Zurich just after a flight from the US, so queued up for an hour behind 400 Americans.

I then when to Lanzarote and didn’t even have to wait. It was just my flight.

@SadiraOfTyr

Ah wait, is this a thing at EU airports for non-EU passport holders

Basically yes...

Not sure why some posters introduced delays they'd experienced at UK airports into the discussion.

Flew into Bulgaria, end of July, it took about 40mins longer than it has in previous years to get through passport control. The finger prints were done on a pad and only took about 5mins each for DH and I. Don’t get me started on the wait for the luggage though….

I can assure you they are absolutely not. I've seen them with my own eyes. It's definitely improving, but there are times/places where it's still bad

Rome just after the full rollout in April was shambolic. We were herded to machines which seemed to either do nothing or just worked for no one. Then we were herded to an hour long queue for a manned booth. Then we had to go through e-gates afterwards. We are a mixed EU/non-EU passport family and should in theory be able to go through a family lane together, but the herding people were in no mood for reasonableness, so I got my husband with an EU passport to take our child through the EU lane while I waited in the various queues for about an hour and a half. I had expected it, so just read stuff on my phone and didn’t stress about it.

The way out was much calmer. The queues were short anyway, but we were directed to a family lane and hardly waited any time.

So it is pot luck - as the varied experiences on this thread show.

@eurochick

All the rest of my family have EU passports. Copenhagen wouldn't let me go through with them.

We were sent to register which took about 40 minutes because there was a massive queue. Once we had registered we were told we shouldn’t have gone there because we have a baby, by the same man that walked us to the machine. We then got sent to a family queue which we waited 45 minutes in, most of the people in the queue had also wrongly been in the other queue too so would have been faster if everyone was directed correctly initially.

I have been away twice since and not seen any of the gates in use.

Thank you