Brussels Airport faced another stress-test of the EU’s new Entry/Exit System (EES) on Friday morning as thousands of music-lovers arrived for the second Tomorrowland weekend. Posts on the festival’s Reddit forum reported non-EU passport holders waiting between two and three hours at immigration, with airport staff handing out bottled water and sweets to ease tempers. One Canadian passenger wrote that he was “still in line after 1 hr 45 min and haven’t even seen a kiosk yet.” Airport operator Brussels Airport Company confirmed that peak-hour processing was slowed by the mandatory biometric capture (finger-prints and facial scan) required under the EES for every first-time Schengen entry this summer. Although extra e-gates have been installed, only passengers from visa-exempt countries with biometric passports can use them; everyone else is funnelled to manual booths, where border police must register prints. A spokesperson admitted that arriving wide-body flights from North America, the Gulf and Asia were being scheduled too closely together, “creating a wave effect we can’t absorb fast enough.” Tomorrowland organisers said they had advised ticket-holders flying in on Friday to “allow at least four hours between landing and the first shuttle bus” but many travellers ignored the warning. Corporate travel managers report similar delays for non-festival traffic: consultants arriving for Monday meetings are being urged to land the evening before, while short-haul day-trips are increasingly routed via Amsterdam or Paris until Brussels stabilises its border-control throughput. Belgium’s Federal Police insist the situation is temporary. Eight additional booths will open in Concourse B next week, and a fast-track lane for holders of Schengen multiple-entry visas who have already provided biometrics during a previous trip is being piloted. Nonetheless, airlines told the airport community meeting that mis-connecting passengers now account for 3 % of daily traffic – a level unseen since the immediate post-COVID restart. For mobility teams the advice is clear: build generous buffers into itineraries, check whether employees have an existing EES record, and consider booking refundable rail tickets as back-up. The EES will remain in force, and queues are likely to worsen again when the parallel ETIAS pre-authorisation system launches later in the year.
