Border police working at one of Europe’s busiest airports have warned British passengers to arrive three to four hours before their flights during the summer holidays due to huge queues for new EU biometric checks.
Cristian Sternativo, a border officer at Milan Malpensa Airport and provincial secretary of the SAP police union, says the full roll-out of fingerprint and facial scans from the Entry/Exit System (EES) since 10 April has led to three-hour queues and hundreds of passengers missing flights.
It comes as Ryanair today said it has written to governments in 29 countries including Italy, Spain, France and Portugal to suspend EES until September, after Greece introduced similar measures for British nationals earlier this week.
Data shows delays at arrivals for EU airports increased more than tenfold in October 2025, the month EES was launched, compared to the previous year.
Figures from Eurocontrol, Europe’s aviation safety organisation, show that in October 2025 there were 28,000 minutes in delays from “other” causes – which excludes strikes, bad weather, air traffic control staffing and equipment problems.
It was the highest monthly figure since March 2020, at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.
In March 2026, passengers faced more than 15,000 minutes in delays, up from just over 2,300 the previous March – the highest figure for that month in six years.
Passengers stuck in tailbacks at Milan’s Malpensa and Linate airports have experienced “frustration, stress” and complained to officers, Sternativo said.
But with millions of Britons preparing to head on holiday in the coming months, forecasts for the peak summer holiday travel period are “worrying”, he said, adding that police are expecting queues of more than four hours at major airports during July and August.
“In extremely crowded situations, incidents of sickness and fainting among waiting passengers are not unexpected, especially given the unpredictable length of queues,” he told The i Paper.
“For us border police officers, the workload has increased dramatically. The main challenge is managing passenger stress while operating a technological system that can experience initial bottlenecks.”
He added that British passengers heading to Milan’s airports should be advised to “arrive at the airport at least three to four hours early for international flights” in July and August.
Tech issues and lack of officers
EES, which has been phased in over six months, requires non-EU nationals to provide fingerprints and facial photos when travelling to Schengen Area countries, a process which is replacing manual passport stamping.
But airports and airlines say technological glitches and a lack of border officers to carry out the biometric checks are causing long delays at peak times.
The average processing time per passenger has increased from a few seconds to several minutes, Sternativo said.
The full roll-out of EES to all passengers on 10 April had caused “an immediate spike” in waiting times compared to previous months, he said
A Spanish police officer shows an Entry/Exit System (EES) kiosk (Photo: Juan Medina/Reuters)Border police at Milan have temporarily paused the EES checks to avoid passengers missing their flights as queues build up, a provision allowed by the EU until September.
This month, holidaymakers spoke of “carnage” as more than 100 people missed their flight back to Manchester after getting stuck in three-hour EES queues at Linate.
“Similar incidents, though less severe, were reported as recurring during the initial system deployment phase,” said Sternativo.
In Italy, day-to-day operational management of EES is the responsibility of the border police at airports in collaboration with airport operators.
The SAP has also described queues at Rome’s Fiumicino Airport that spilled outside the terminal building and of a “risk of system collapse” at airports across the country.
Warnings across Europe
Ryanair’s chief operations officer, Neal McMahon, called for the system to be suspended at European airports, warning of potential chaos during the busy summer period.
He said: “Governments across Europe are trying to introduce an incomplete IT system in the middle of the busiest travel season of the year.
“Passengers are paying the price, being forced to face hours-long queues at passport control and, in some cases, missing flights.”
In France, Nicolas Paulissen, general delegate of the Union des Aéroports Français (UAF), said airports had also been suspending EES checks temporarily as queues built up to prevent massive tailbacks.
Instead, French border police – the Police Aux Frontieres (PAF) – are manually carrying out the fingerprint and facial scans on passengers which is adding to processing times.
But he has raised concerns there is “no plan B” after September when the grace period that allows EES to be temporarily waived ends.
“We are worried, we are concerned, and we don’t have any big plan for September and following months,” he said.
“You have to implement EES fully from the very beginning of September. The EU regulations won’t authorise flexibility from September. If the situation is not better, we don’t have any plan B.”
The European Commission insists the system has been working “very well” in the “overwhelming majority” of member states since the full launch on 10 April.
While a few member states had detected “technical issues”, these were being addressed by those countries, a Brussels spokesperson said. The spokesperson added that registering a traveller takes on average only 70 seconds.
But ACI Europe, a body representing over 600 airports, warned this month passengers were facing delays of up to three hours during peak travel periods and said “major concerns are now a reality”, with passengers missing flights and delays due to prolonged border processing times.
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