Airport chaos, delays as E.U. debuts biometric border system

Shoneez Sallie had been traveling for 23 hours from South Africa when she landed in Brussels, only to face a demoralizing sight that has become all too common for foreign travelers entering or leaving the European Union. There was a long, long line for passport control, barely moving.

Ms. Sallie, 39, said she stood in that line for five hours and 15 minutes. There were only six border security booths open, with officers in them processing roughly 1,000 people, she estimated. She waited so long that the rental company gave away the car she had reserved, and she had to pay about $740 more for another one.

“Some people were sitting on the floor and sort of scooting their bums up when the line moved,” she said. She posted a video on social media showing the dispirited crowd under the glaring lights of the Brussels entry hall.

It’s not just Brussels. In Lisbon, the lines peaked at six hours. In Amsterdam, KLM says its travelers are missing their flights at twice the usual rate during peak hours. Across Europe, travelers have been bemoaning delayed vacations and chaotic business travel.

All blame the same culprit: Europe’s new biometric border system, which aims to better track travelers — and keep out unauthorized visitors — by taking their fingerprints and facial scans. So far, it has succeeded at annoying them.

Both travelers and much of the travel industry are irate, with the Ryanair chief condemning the “bureaucratic stupidity” of the European Union.

Though E.U. officials have pointed a finger at pre-existing problems with airport staffing and logistics, Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the bloc’s executive arm, has acknowledged “technical problems” in the new system. Recognizing the severity of the problem, the European Commission is considering extending a grace period that allows airports to temporarily stop collecting key biometric data in the case of long lines.

Guillaume Mercier, a spokesman for the commission, said last week that “we are now in close, in constructive contact” with nations “to see what the challenges are at certain border crossing points.”

Nightmare experiences are well documented, but not typical. Based on data collected by the firm Qsensor, wait times in Amsterdam averaged 15 minutes in late June and early July, and about nine minutes in Paris.

But when problems occur, they balloon quickly. Reports of hourslong lines and missed connections continue to accumulate across Europe, blanketing social media and making for office chatter among travelers around the world.

“My family had warned me about how long these lines were, but they were so much worse than we expected,” said Mike Sofka, 39, who waited in line with his wife at Charles de Gaulle Airport near Paris for about three hours before flying back to Chicago in early July.

The goal of the new system is simple: Europe wants to better track who travels into and out of its 29-country free-movement zone. Anyone visiting from the outside, including from the United States and Britain, must register.

But gathering the biometric data takes time, especially when thousands of people need to do it at once. Big backups have been reported ever since the system began to be phased in during the autumn of 2025. Airport workers often do what they can to help, like distributing water bottles, but tempers can run short.

Returning home from a July holiday at Lake Como, in Italy, Taylor Henriksen, 25, had a layover in Brussels, where she waited in line for around two and a half hours to get through passport control.

She missed her connecting flight to Washington, D.C.

“They were handing out Biscoff cookies and lollipops,” she said. “It made it worse, honestly. I was like, don’t even do that.”

Some people were “borderline in tears,” saying that they needed to get home to their families, but that the airport staff would not allow them to cut the line. She said one worker, rather than offering solutions, was “just saying, ‘Want a cookie? Want a cookie?’”

Alexander Zinell, the chief executive of Fraport Greece, which runs airports around the country, including on the islands of Corfu and Mykonos, said that customers have at times lined up out the doors before reaching border control.

Some authorities blame glitches in the technology itself — issues have been reported with both the vendors implementing the process and the European Union’s central technology. Kiosks are meant to collect the biometric images without needing border control officers to do it, but in many airports, the machines either do not work or haven’t been activated. Daniel Bunn, an American, said that was the case when he flew to Brussels on business in April.

“The kiosks are right there next to where you’re standing in line,” said Mr. Bunn, head of the Tax Foundation in Washington, explaining that he had waited for an hour and a half.

Ihsane Chioua Lekhli, a Brussels Airport spokesperson, said the airport had installed around 60 kiosks to reduce the number of passengers needing to go through staffed border checkpoints, but the machines are not yet in use as they are still being tested. The airport hopes to have them operational “as soon as possible,” she said.

Some airports are slowly figuring out how to manage the new system.

Pedro Moura, general coordinator of Portugal’s Borders and Foreigners Coordination Unit, said that while lines at Lisbon’s airport had reached as long as six hours in December, these days, they are an hour during peak periods. Ahead of the summer rush, the border authority was adding 369 new border guards to ease pressure. The country has also been early to roll out an app — also active in Sweden — that allows people to submit much of their information in advance.

In some places and at quiet times of day, lines are whizzing along even with the new system.

Cameron Hewitt, a travel writer for Rick Steves’ Europe, worried that he might encounter problems when he traveled through Amsterdam from Seattle this year. “I was a little nervous,” he said. “I didn’t dillydally getting off the plane.”

In the end, though, he whisked through registration and made his tight connection in plenty of time.

But Ms. Sallie, a travel agent who thought that the horror stories she saw online might be exaggerated, has found during her travels that meltdowns are real. She has heard from other travelers about backups in Amsterdam and Paris, and in addition to her own Brussels debacle, she had to wait in a two-hour line in Copenhagen. She arrived to her flight only five minutes before the gate closed.

Border guards can already hit pause on collecting fingerprints and facial scans for up to six hours once lines get out of control. That ability is set to expire in September, but the European Union can extend it.

Airlines and airports asked for greater flexibility to suspend the system pre-emptively, after they know a rush is coming but before lines have formed. E.U. officials refused that request.

Eventually, the authorities still insist, updated border checkpoints will be both more secure and faster than the old ways.

Bart van den Brink, the Dutch migration minister, acknowledged that the system is a “big implementation challenge,” but said that it “will be worth it.”