BOSSES at leading budget airline Ryanair have revealed the worst airports in Europe for border delays arising from the EU’s controversial Entry/Exit System (EES) – and it is grim viewing for those visiting Spain.
The Dublin-based carrier has named seven airports popular with Brits that it says are suffering the most.
Four of those are in Spain, with Tenerife South, Alicante, Palma de Mallorca and Malaga all struggling to cope since the new system was rolled out earlier this year.
The remaining three are Bergamo in Italy, Krakow in Poland and Paris Beauvais in France.
Ryanair said these airports were ‘not ready’ to deal with the high volume of passengers expected to travel over the coming months, with insufficient numbers of staff and kiosks.
They said this would likely generate huge queues this summer as the holiday season begins to ramp up.
“Governments across Europe are trying to roll out a half-finished IT system during the busiest travel period of the year and passengers are paying the price – being forced to endure hours-long queues at passport control and, in some cases, missing their flights,” said Neal McMahon, Ryanair’s chief operations officer.
Last year, Ryanair served more than 66 million passengers in Spain.
The EES replaces human-controlled passport stamps with automatic facial recognition and fingerprint scans, digitally recording all entries and exits to and from the bloc.
It applies to all non-EU citizens entering the Schengen zone, including British passport holders.
EES machines were turned on at all entry points on April 10, prompting a wave of significant disruption across Europe as travellers waited to register their biometric data.
Earlier this week, Europe’s airports and airlines united to urge Brussels to pause the EES system amid warnings it could cause painful five-hour queues this summer.
In an open letter addressed to EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, Europe’s aviation bosses said the situation had reached a ‘critical point’.
The plea, signed by IATA, A4E and ACI Europe, said passengers at both large and smaller airports were being forced to wait ‘for extended periods outside terminal buildings’ because EES kiosks ‘cannot process arrivals quickly enough’.
The new system is ‘creating severe operational consequences, disrupting passengers and placing border authorities, airports and airlines under unsustainable pressure’, the letter added.
Speaking at an industry event in Prague, ACI Europe boss Stefan Schulte urged politicians to ‘stop pretending that EES is working just fine – it is not’.
“Passengers are queuing for hours at peak traffic times and I just do not know how we will be able to cope in the coming weeks with the expected increase in traffic,” he said.
Earlier this year, Greece temporarily suspended the requirement for UK passport holders to go through EES biometric registration, citing the potential for lengthy waits.
But Italy and Portugal, who wanted to follow Greece’s lead, were blocked from doing so by the European Commission.
The only legal exception to the new system under EU rules is to pause biometric collection for six-hour windows during extremely busy periods between July and September.
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