Airlines and Airports Demand Rethink of EU Border System as Delays Persist

Europe's airports and airlines associations have called on EU authorities to take action over continuing congestion at Schengen external border crossings, The Local Italy reported on Tuesday, one year after the entry-exit system began. The associations described the delays as unacceptable, with waits reported at up to five hours in some cases.

The EES replaced manual passport stamping with digital registration of non-EU travellers at the bloc's external borders. The complaints reported by The Local Italy concern the practical throughput of that system at points of entry, not its legal basis.

For the Valle d'Aosta, the relevant border is not an airport. The region's external frontier runs through the Mont Blanc tunnel and the Great St Bernard corridor toward France and Switzerland, and it is a road frontier rather than an air one. The wire does not report on conditions at those crossings, and no claim about them is made here.

The timing matters. The EES was introduced in stages, and the first year of any large-scale border IT system tends to produce exactly the kind of queuing that carriers are now describing. The Local Italy's report frames the airlines' and airports' intervention as a demand for a rethink rather than a call for repeal, which suggests the industry's objection is to implementation and capacity rather than to the principle of registering third-country travellers.

The mechanism of the problem, as the industry bodies describe it, is throughput: the rate at which travellers can be processed at a given number of enrolment points. Airports can add desks and staff, but only within the footprint of an existing terminal. Land crossings have different constraints again, including the physical space at a tunnel portal and the fact that traffic arrives in bursts determined by shuttle schedules rather than by flight timetables.

That distinction is where a region like this one reads the story. Alpine crossings are seasonal and weather-dependent: a delay measured in hours at a tunnel mouth in February is a different problem from the same delay in a terminal, because vehicles queue in the open and the mountain sets the schedule. None of this is in the wire, and it is offered as the shape of the question rather than as a reported fact about current conditions.

What the wire does establish is that the pressure is now organised and public. Airport and airline associations speaking jointly carry more weight with the European Commission than individual operators, and a year is long enough that the complaint can no longer be dismissed as teething. Whether the Commission responds with technical adjustments, additional funding for border infrastructure, or a revised timetable is not yet reported.

The wider context is that the EES sits alongside the forthcoming ETIAS travel authorisation, another layer of pre-travel registration for visa-exempt visitors. If the first system is still producing five-hour waits at some crossings, the argument for sequencing the second carefully becomes easier to make. The foreign wires have not reported a decision on that point.