Nine EU States Delay the New Border System, and the Alpine Crossings Wait

The Guardian reported on 14 September that nine EU countries — among them France, Greece, Portugal and Italy — have asked for more time to implement the Entry/Exit System, the biometric border regime intended to register non-EU visitors as they cross into the Schengen area. The delay was sought by holiday hotspots that feared the checks would snarl busy airports in the middle of the season, according to the paper.

The story is usually told through airports. For the Alps it is a road story. The Valle d'Aosta's two gates to the outside world — the Mont Blanc tunnel toward Chamonix and the Great St Bernard tunnel toward Martigny — are among the busiest transalpine road crossings in Europe, and both carry a heavy share of non-EU traffic, from British second-home owners to long-haul coaches working the Alpine circuit.

The EES is designed to replace passport stamping with a digital record of entry and exit, capturing fingerprints and facial images on first registration. Doing that at a tunnel booth, in a queue of cars and articulated lorries on a two-lane approach, is a different problem from doing it in an airport hall with a dedicated concourse. That is precisely the kind of infrastructure question the Guardian's reporting on the delay leaves open.

The Guardian notes that the countries seeking more time argued their airports could not absorb the new procedures during peak periods. The same logic applies, with less visibility, to land frontiers. At Mont Blanc, traffic is already metered by a booking system and by the tunnel's single-bore design; adding a biometric registration step to each crossing risks lengthening queues that in winter can back up for kilometres on the Italian approach. French and Swiss coverage of the crossing has long treated the tunnel as a shared bottleneck, and the EES adds a new reason for the two sides to coordinate.

There is a wider context the foreign press has been tracking all month. Italy and Spain have been maintaining tit-for-tat border checks of their own in the wake of a migrant surge, a dispute The Local Italy reported on 15 September and which the Guardian's EES story sits alongside rather than within. Two separate regimes are now converging on the same travellers: temporary reintroduced controls at certain frontiers, and the permanent biometric system still waiting to be switched on. For anyone driving from Aosta to Chamonix, both may soon apply.

What the Guardian does not say is when the EES will actually begin operating in the nine countries that asked for relief, or whether the Commission has granted the extension. Until that is settled, the practical advice for travellers through the Alpine tunnels is unchanged, and the valley's tourism operators — whose winter season depends on cross-border movement — are planning around a system whose start date remains, on the available reporting, uncertain.