Corporate flyers heading back from Schengen airports this summer should pad their schedules by an extra hour, after the UK boss of Wizz Air warned that biometric border checks are sending queues spiralling past three hours at the worst-hit terminals.
Yvonne Moynihan, UK country manager and corporate officer at the Hungarian low-cost carrier, told the BBC that the new EU Entry/Exit System (EES) is causing such uneven delays at Schengen passport control that passengers have already missed return legs and onward connections. Her advice for travellers homebound from the Continent: budget three hours at the airport, not the customary two.
The intervention is the latest sign that the bloc’s long-delayed biometric border programme is buckling as it heads into peak season. Industry trade body ACI Europe this week surveyed 45 airports across 20 EU member states and found waits of up to three and a half hours, with the situation expected to “deteriorate further” and risk becoming “unmanageable” as summer traffic builds. Travelling For Business reported last month that EES queues had already hit the three-hour mark at major European hubs, prompting calls from carriers and airports for emergency powers to suspend the checks.
Fragmented rollout, fragmented experience
EES, which requires non-EU nationals to register fingerprints and a facial scan on entry to the Schengen zone and have them verified on exit, was meant to be fully live across the area’s air, sea and rail borders from 10 April. Since the phased start last October, the European Commission says nearly 80 million entries and exits have been logged and around 35,000 travellers refused entry.
Moynihan said the reality on the ground was “fragmented across Europe”. While some journeys had been “seamless”, longer waits were piling up at “the usual hotspots – Spain, Portugal, France”. Her own half-term trip to Mallorca, she said, was painless thanks to extra staff and “a significant number of EES kiosks”. Greece, meanwhile, has effectively suspended biometric checks for UK arrivals to head off summer disruption, using flexibility the Commission has granted member states until September.
A Commission spokesperson pushed back, saying EES is functioning “at almost all border crossing points” and that registration typically takes about a minute. Brussels has put the onus on member states to staff borders adequately. Portugal, where some of the longest waits have been recorded, has pledged 360 additional border officers at its airports from July.
The return leg is the new pinch point
For business travellers, Moynihan’s most pointed warning concerns the journey home. Because EES has to verify biometric data on exit as well as entry, queues are now building on the departures side — a phase of the trip many corporates have historically treated as routine.
“When you land in the destination airport, there might be queues, so you should bring a portable charger or water,” she said. “Because there is another passport check, that’s where we see that people have, again, experienced longer waiting times than anticipated.”
Passengers with connecting flights should leave “a number of hours” between sectors, she added. Border officers, she noted, are proactively pausing EES checks when waits balloon, a discretionary lever the Commission has authorised for “exceptional circumstances” until September.
The UK government’s Travel Aware service is now urging Britons to factor the new checks into planning, particularly for trips with tight schedules.
Confidence on capacity, caution on fares
Despite the queues, Moynihan said Wizz Air customers “should feel confident booking” for summer, echoing recent comments from the bosses of EasyJet and Jet2. The airline, which has been steadily rolling out business-style perks across its network to court corporate traffic, has seen a trend towards later bookings, helping push fares down in the short term.
She added that suppliers had adapted to instability in the Middle East affecting jet fuel, no shortages were anticipated, and Wizz had no plans to cut its schedule. Fares could climb if oil prices stay elevated, but Moynihan suggested carriers could absorb some of that hit by stripping costs elsewhere in the short run.
For travel managers, the takeaway is sharper than the headline number. Three hours is the new floor at the worst-affected European airports, and on the return leg, not just the outbound. Itineraries built around the old two-hour rule of thumb need a rewrite before the summer schedule peaks.