Europe’s new EES border checks are creating hours-long airport queues this summer

Europe’s usual summer airport crowds have this year been made considerably worse by long daily queues at border control, caused by the new Entry/Exit System (EES) now in place for travellers arriving from outside the EU. The system was meant to make border checks faster and more modern, relying on biometric data such as facial scans and fingerprints. In practice, it has turned out to be slow, frequently freezing for several minutes at a time while collecting each passenger’s data, leaving travellers waiting for hours and, in a growing number of cases, missing their flights entirely.

EES queues Europe airports: how bad it has actually gotten

Airline KLM estimates that at Amsterdam, the number of passengers missing flights during peak hours has doubled compared with normal levels. At Lisbon’s Humberto Delgado Airport, queues have stretched as long as six hours, while Milan Malpensa is dealing with disruption and delays on a daily basis. The problems don’t directly affect EU citizens, whether flying within the bloc or to and from destinations outside it, though congestion and knock on disruption can still end up affecting them indirectly at some airports.

According to an analysis by the Financial Times, queues at Europe’s major airports have roughly doubled compared with last year. Data from Qsensor, which tracks real time airport wait times, shows the maximum queue time at Frankfurt Airport hit 120 minutes in July, twice what it was a year earlier. Amsterdam saw a similar jump, from 80 minutes up to 120.

Frankfurt Amsterdam Lisbon wait times compared

Travellers have started building in considerably more buffer time than usual to avoid getting caught out. The new checks apply to anyone who isn’t an EU citizen, which includes travellers from the UK. Some airlines, Wizz Air among them, have urged their British passengers specifically to arrive at the airport well ahead of time to avoid the risk of missing a flight.

Airports pushed back, without much success

Airport operators had flagged concerns about exactly this scenario since the EES began its gradual rollout in October 2025, worried about what would happen once summer travel volumes picked up. At one point, queues grew long enough that the Airports Council International, the body representing European airports, sent an open letter to European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen asking for the new rules to be relaxed over the summer months. That request was turned down, though the Commission has acknowledged the situation. Commission spokesperson Guillaume Mercier said the Commission remains in close contact with EU member states to understand the specific difficulties being encountered at certain border crossings.

Many airports are also pushing for an extension of the window that currently lets them temporarily suspend EES checks when queues become too long to manage, a workaround plenty of airports have been relying on for months. Under the current directive, that option is only available until 6 September, after which the EES is meant to run without any possibility of suspension.

How airports are coping in the meantime

Cristian Sternativo, provincial secretary of Italy’s autonomous state police union, told La Prealpina that Malpensa is undersized for the traffic levels it now handles, and that things should improve once expansion works on the airport’s Extra Schengen area are finished. For now, though, he said staffing simply isn’t keeping pace with demand, particularly at certain times of day during this period, with only around 35 border agents on duty when roughly ten more would be needed.

Portugal has taken a more proactive approach. Pedro Moura, general coordinator of Portugal’s Border and Immigration Coordination Unit, said the country hired 369 new border guards ahead of the summer season specifically to ease pressure at the airport, alongside a new app that lets travellers submit most of their information through a dedicated portal in advance.

The picture isn’t uniformly bad across every airport and every time of day, either. Moura noted that queues at Lisbon airport had actually reached six hours back in December, whereas during the current period they run closer to about an hour at peak times, suggesting some of the worst bottlenecks may already be easing compared with the situation earlier in the system’s rollout.