Airlines are warning that the passport queues in EU airports are likely to get worse before they get better — except, that is, in Greece.
Images of weary Britons waiting to start their holidays or get home appeared prominently in the media last week. Passengers travelling through airports such as Palma de Mallorca, Malaga, Milan, Lisbon, Paris Orly, Lyons and Brussels encountered queues of up to four hours at passport control, leading to thousands of delayed departures, frayed tempers and some travellers missing flights. Ryanair has been advising its passengers to arrive at the airport at least three hours before their flight.
The delays are the consequence of the more stringent passport checks demanded by EU regulation 2017/458, introduced to combat crime and terrorism. Rather than being waved through after the briefest glimpse at their travel documents, Britons landing in or flying out of Europe are now having their passports scanned and checked against various databases.
To anyone stuck in the passport queue this week, it will be galling to learn that it didn’t have to be this way. The new EU rules don’t have to be enforced until a deadline of October 7. Greece — along with Austria and Denmark — predicted, sensibly, that introducing the extra checks during the peak summer-holiday period would lead to unacceptable delays, so have held off until the autumn.
It’s not as though the countries that have introduced the new checks weren’t given warning. The EU security commissioner, Julian King, says: “This system of checks was proposed in 2015. It was agreed in 2016. We are now more than midway through 2017. National border agencies and airport authorities have had lots of time to prepare and put in place the necessary arrangements and staff.”
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“The only way to lessen delays is to increase the space for immigration controls, build more e-gates and deploy more staff,” says the lobby group Airlines for Europe. “We have had no feedback from the French, Italian, Portuguese or Spanish governments that this is happening, so for the next couple of weeks — the busiest of the season — the delays are likely to get worse.”
The mathematics are depressing. In practice, it takes between 30 seconds and two minutes to scan a passport, but with up to 189 passengers on a single Boeing 737-800, that could mean a wait of at least an hour and a half for the unfortunate at the back of the queue. Multiply that by the 1,074 flights that the Spanish airport operator AENA said were scheduled to land or take off from Mallorca’s Son Sant Joan airport yesterday, and it’s easy to see how the queues build up... and up.
At Malaga airport, where queues of four hours were reported on social media last week, passenger numbers have grown from 12m in 2010 to a projected 19m in 2017. That’s a 58% increase in seven years, yet border police numbers are the same as they were in 2010. In Ibiza, unions are warning that with just 126 staff, the airport is “overwhelmed” and unable to cope with the 169,468 passengers predicted to arrive this weekend. At Barcelona’s El Prat airport, delays will be exacerbated this month by a series of helpfully timed strikes by security staff.
In France, airports including Nice, Lyons and Paris Charles de Gaulle are advising all passengers to arrive at least 2½ hours before their flights.
The travel trade body Abta said that holidaymakers on package breaks will be taken to the airport in plenty of time, so as not to miss flights. It advised independent travellers to check the latest situation with their airline and factor in extra travel time.
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