Prague Airport Launches Immediate Action Plan to Cut EES Queues for Non-Schengen Arrivals

Facing persistent bottlenecks since the EU Entry/Exit System (EES) went live, Václav Havel Airport Prague has unveiled a fast-track action plan designed to reduce average passport-control waiting times for third-country nationals to under 15 minutes. The measures, announced on 1 October after an extraordinary board meeting, are being implemented jointly with the Alien Police Directorate and the Interior Ministry. Key elements include the permanent deployment of multilingual "Red Teams" to assist passengers at self-service registration kiosks, dynamic staffing models based on 30-day traffic heatmaps, additional way-finding floor decals and real-time queue information on airport displays. Front-line staff are collecting immediate user-experience feedback to identify why roughly 40 % of travellers currently fail to complete the biometric EES enrolment at the kiosks. To soften the impact during peak arrival banks from Tel Aviv, Dubai and London, the airport has also introduced a customer-care protocol: free bottled water, apology messages in Hebrew, Chinese and eight other languages, and pre-arrival briefing materials distributed by partner airlines. Two supplementary border-control lanes and four more EES kiosks are scheduled to be installed before the Christmas travel surge. Business-travel managers should alert employees that pre-completion of EES registration (where possible) and strict adherence to kiosk instructions will speed clearance. Frequent travellers with upcoming trips are advised to update arrival-time allowances in itineraries and to use Terminal 2 wherever airline choice permits, as Schengen flights remain unaffected. The initiative is part of a longer-term CZK 650 million border-modernisation programme that will culminate in a full rebuild of Terminal 1 passport control by April 2027. The airport expects that once kiosk-completion rates hit 80 %, overall processing capacity will increase by 25 %, safeguarding on-time performance for both connecting and point-to-point passengers.