The EU's new Entry/Exit System (EES), which requires non-EU citizens to be photographed and fingerprinted when crossing Schengen borders, has caused significant frustration for British travellers this summer, with reports of long queues, missed connections and record-keeping errors. Although the scheme has technically been in full force since April, following its launch last autumn, it has been plagued by technical problems, and the European Commission rejected calls from airports and airlines to pause its rollout during the busy summer period, despite allowing border police a temporary opt-out to ease queues if needed.

Travellers described a range of issues with the system, which is meant to track whether non-EU citizens exceed their 90-day allowance within any 180-day period. Martin Farrall, a 67-year-old retired professor from Warwickshire, found his exit from the Schengen zone had not been recorded after a ferry crossing in May, leaving his account showing an incorrectly dwindling day allowance that briefly reached zero before self-correcting weeks later; he received no response after reporting the error to French authorities. Nadia, a solicitor from Greater Manchester, reported a smooth experience in Tenerife but faced extremely long, poorly signposted queues at Frankfurt airport in July, where officials skipped fingerprinting entirely due to the backlog, leading her to question why member states' systems fail to share data with one another. The opt-out allowing relaxed border checks is due to expire next month.