Airlines and Airports Demand EES Rethink as Five-Hour Border Queues Persist

European airports and airlines have asked EU authorities to revisit the EU's Entry/Exit System one year after its introduction, saying delays at Schengen external border crossings remain unacceptable and have run to five hours in some cases, according to The Local Italy. The industry body representing the continent's airports and carriers wants action to ease congestion that it says has persisted through the system's first year of operation.

The EES replaced manual passport stamping with biometric registration for non-EU travellers entering the Schengen area. The complaint is not about the principle of the system but its throughput: the queues form at the physical border, where terminals were sized for a stamp and a glance rather than fingerprint and facial capture for every third-country arrival.

The frustration is being voiced by the airports and airlines association, not by a single carrier, which gives the complaint weight in Brussels. According to The Local Italy's report, the association has asked EU authorities to take action on congestion that has produced waits of up to five hours at Schengen external border crossings. The demand comes exactly one year on from the system's launch, a milestone that makes the operational record hard to dismiss as teething trouble.

For Genoa the mechanism matters less at the passenger terminal than at the water's edge. Liguria's economy runs on the port of Genoa, and a large share of what moves through it is roll-on roll-off traffic — trucks and their drivers crossing to and from Tunisia, Morocco and other non-EU shores. Those drivers are third-country nationals, and every one of them passes through a border process. When the same border regime that is producing five-hour queues at airports is applied at a Ro-Ro ramp, the delay is not measured in passenger patience but in berthed tonnage and in the schedule of the vessel waiting behind.

The port community's argument has always been the same one the airlines are now making: a border is an infrastructure asset or a bottleneck depending on how it is staffed and how its data systems are built. The EES was designed to be faster than stamping once registration is complete, because a registered traveller is supposed to clear on biometrics alone. The industry complaint suggests that the enrolment phase — the first crossing for each traveller — is still absorbing capacity that the terminals do not have to spare.

What comes next is a decision for the EU institutions, and the airlines' intervention is timed to reach them before any scheduled review. The Local Italy's account does not indicate what specific remedy the association has proposed, nor whether Brussels has responded. What is clear from the report is that a system sold on speed is being judged, one year in, on queue length.

For a region whose livelihood is measured in ship calls and truck turns, the lesson is familiar. Rome and Berlin have spent recent weeks asking Brussels for a brake on new EU rules. The EES complaint is the mirror image: not too much law, but a law already in force that the border cannot physically process at the rate the timetable assumes.