Nine EU States Delay New Border Checks, and Italy's Airports Breathe

Nine European Union countries have secured another postponement of the bloc's new biometric border regime, the Guardian reported on Monday, with France, Greece, Portugal and Italy among the states pleading for more time to install the Entry/Exit System at busy airports. The EES is meant to register non-EU visitors' fingerprints and facial images at the point of entry, replacing passport stamping, but its rollout has slipped repeatedly since it was first scheduled.

The delay matters most where arrivals are concentrated in a few hours of the day. Venice's Marco Polo airport is a seasonal machine, and the Guardian's account of crowded terminals and unfinished equipment describes precisely the condition that has kept the system on hold.

According to the Guardian, the countries asked for breathing room during their busiest periods rather than a permanent exemption. The paper frames the request as logistical, not political: governments say they support the system but cannot yet process travellers through it without queues that spill onto the apron.

The EES is the first stage of the EU's long-promised overhaul of external border management, to be followed by the European Travel Information and Authorisation System. Under the original timetable it would have been live before the 2024 summer season. Each postponement has been justified by member states on the same grounds: the hardware and the staffing are not in place, and the cost of a failed launch at a peak-weekend airport is measured in hours of stranded passengers.

For the Veneto the question is not abstract. Marco Polo and Treviso handle a flow that is overwhelmingly non-EU in origin — British, American, Gulf and Asian visitors — and it arrives compressed into the months when the lagoon city is already at its most strained. A border procedure that adds minutes per traveller compounds at the arrivals hall, and the region's hoteliers and tour operators have watched each deadline pass with the same calculation: a queue at the border is a lost afternoon in Venice.

The Guardian notes that the delay was granted to a group of member states rather than to the Union as a whole, which leaves the system's start date uneven across the Schengen area. That asymmetry has its own consequence for travellers, who may meet the biometric checks at one airport and not at the next. For a region whose economy leans on repeat visitors from outside the EU, predictability is itself a form of infrastructure.

The European Commission has separately signalled that it is reviewing the Schengen short-stay visa rules and fees, according to The Local Italy, with the stated aim of making visa policy more coherent and secure while facilitating legitimate travel. Read together, the two moves suggest Brussels is trying to synchronise the physical and the documentary sides of the border before the next high season, rather than after it.

What the foreign coverage does not supply is a firm new date. The Guardian reports a further delay, not a launch plan, and the countries involved have asked for time rather than published a schedule. Until a date is fixed and met, the operators who depend on the Veneto's arrival halls will keep planning around a system that exists on paper and not yet at the gate.