Travellers passing through Zurich Airport on 14 July woke up to a sobering headline: “Neue EU-Regeln bremsen Passkontrolle” (“New EU rules slow passport control”). The Entry/Exit System (EES) — a central pillar of the EU’s new smart-borders package — quietly went live at Swiss external borders this week, and the consequences were immediately visible. Under EES, the passports of third-country nationals are scanned, photographed and paired with four fingerprints the first time they enter the Schengen area. Over time this biometric record should speed future crossings and help weed out overstayers, but the initial registration process takes significantly longer than the traditional date-stamp. Zurich Airport, which can see more than 40,000 non-EU passengers on a peak summer day, is warning of “substantially longer waiting times” during the July-August rush. Swiss and EU/EFTA citizens are largely unaffected; they can use the e-gates as before. Non-EU business travellers, however, now face an extra administrative step that could jeopardise tight connections to Swiss rail and onward European flights. The cantonal police have redeployed staff to manual booths and the airport authority is urging carriers to remind premium passengers to allow at least 45 minutes for border formalities. For global mobility managers, the message is clear: itineraries that once worked with a 60-minute connection in Zurich may now need 90. Companies arranging short-stay visas for assignees should also note that EES automatically records every entry and exit, limiting the scope for “resetting” Schengen-stay counters by crossing to neighbouring states. Looking ahead, the EES roll-out is a dress rehearsal for ETIAS, the electronic travel authorisation that visa-exempt visitors — including Americans and Britons — will need from late 2026 or early 2027. Zurich’s current bottlenecks therefore offer a preview of wider changes coming to Switzerland’s border architecture, with technology promising efficiency in the long run but teething pains in the short term.
Source: Nau.ch
