Europe’s largest airline, Ryanair, has written to transport ministers in all 29 countries participating in the EU Entry/Exit System (EES) demanding that the biometric border regime be paused until at least September 2026. The carrier says the first three weeks of live operations have produced “unacceptable” passport-control queues for British holiday-makers and business travellers alike, causing some to miss flights out of UK airports. The letter, disclosed on 30 April by ITV News, brands the launch “botched” and claims airports were given just four weeks’ notice of full enforcement. Under EES, non-EU nationals—including UK citizens post-Brexit—must provide facial images and four fingerprints the first time they cross an external Schengen frontier. Although the system went live on 10 April, many e-gates in Spain, Portugal and France remain offline, forcing manual processing. Ryanair says queues of over two hours were reported at Málaga and Faro during the recent school-holiday peak, while Stansted saw “knock-on delays” when outbound flights waited for late connecting passengers. For corporate mobility teams the disruption is two-fold. First, duty travellers face potential schedule slippage when transiting through the EU on tight connections; second, companies may incur higher costs from re-ticketing and duty-of-care provisioning when employees are stranded. Travel-management companies are already advising clients to add a minimum 90-minute buffer for intra-Schengen transfers until biometric kiosks reach full capacity. The UK government has limited influence—EES is an EU competence—but the Department for Transport confirmed it is in “active discussions” with Brussels about mitigation steps before Britain’s own summer holiday surge. Options include staggered enforcement at smaller regional airports and temporary waivers for families with young children, whose fingerprints are harder to capture. If no pause materialises, UK organisations should prepare traveller-comms campaigns explaining the new biometric requirement, encourage staff to pre-register via available pilot apps where offered, and budget for potential overtime claims from mobile workers delayed on return journeys.
Source: ITV News
