Prague Airport unveils rapid-response action plan to slash EES passport-control queues

Passengers arriving from non-Schengen destinations at Václav Havel Airport Prague faced headline-grabbing delays in September as the EU’s biometric Entry/Exit System (EES) strained existing passport booths. In a press statement released on 1 October 2026, airport operator Letiště Praha outlined an action plan drawn up with the Police of the Czech Republic and the Interior Ministry aimed at restoring a five-minute average processing time before the Christmas peak. Key measures include a multilingual passenger-care programme—staff distribute bottled water and real-time updates in eight languages while monitoring queue lengths—and the permanent deployment of a “Red Team” to triage families, seniors and travellers with reduced mobility toward assisted counters. Data scientists are now using 30-day heat-map forecasts to pre-position police officers and open pop-up control points during bank-holiday waves. At the technology end, UX specialists will overhaul the self-service EES kiosks after field interviews revealed that 40 % of failed registrations were due to unclear Czech/English prompts. Longer-term fixes are also moving forward. The airport confirmed funding for five additional manned booths and four EasyGo Gates in Terminal 1—work that will be staged overnight to avoid shutting lanes entirely. Airlines will be required to push EES how-to videos to passengers before landing, a step the airport says could raise successful kiosk completion rates to 80 %. For corporate travel managers the message is twofold. First, advise non-EU assignees and visitors to complete the kiosk registration diligently and carry printed confirmations to avoid secondary inspection. Second, build in at least 30 extra minutes for post-arrival transfers until the new booths come online, likely in mid-November. Employers relocating staff through Prague this autumn should also watch for ad-hoc lane closures as construction crews install new cabling and biometric readers. The airport stressed that the action plan is a living document; weekly performance dashboards will dictate whether further surge capacity—such as mobile passport-control vans borrowed from Brno Airport—will be activated. Early October data already show average wait times trending down from 52 to 28 minutes, but executives concede that full stabilisation hinges on passengers’ learning curve and EU-level tweaks to EES software.