Spain’s border posts processed their first peak-season weekend entirely under the new EU Entry/Exit System (EES) and, although the biometric kiosks worked largely as expected, questions kept flooding in from long-term residents and cross-border workers. On 27 July the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Migration and Home Affairs published an updated Q&A spelling out exactly who is **exempt** from having fingerprints and facial images captured under the EES. Under the regulation, third-country nationals who hold an EU long-stay visa, an EU residence permit or a residence card issued under the Free-Movement Directive continue to use the manned passport desk and will not be recorded in the EES database. Airline crew, heads-of-state delegations, maritime crew who remain on board and persons who physically cannot provide biometrics are also outside the system. Everyone else — including British visitors, digital-nomad visa holders and VWP travellers heading to the Schengen area for fewer than 90 days — must now enrol fingerprints and a facial image the first time they cross an external Schengen frontier. For Spain this means that tourists arriving at Madrid-Barajas, Barcelona-El Prat, Málaga-Costa del Sol and the country’s seven other designated external-border airports are channelled through new automated kiosks. Airport operator AENA confirmed that Barcelona processed 78,000 EES transactions on Sunday alone without significant queues, but warned that passenger flow could slow later this week when two ground-handling strikes are scheduled. Companies sending staff to Spain for short projects should note that overstays will now be calculated automatically. The EES replaces the old passport-stamping regime and blocks exit gates when the 90/180-day allowance is exceeded, triggering an alert to the National Police. Human-resources teams are therefore being advised to track precisely how many days non-EU assignees spend in the Schengen area, not just in Spain. Immigration lawyers welcomed the clarification but cautioned that some holders of Spanish long-stay visas who are still awaiting issuance of their residence cards have been diverted into the EES queues by airline staff unfamiliar with the rules. Specialists recommend travelling with copies of the appointment confirmation (resguardo) or a print-out of the new Commission guidance until carriers update their check-in scripts.
