What changed at the EU Entry/Exit System border this week — Commission decisions, airline warnings, and airports where the queues got better or worse. Each update links to the airport pages it names.
Brussels Airport confirmed border queues of up to five hours during 21-27 September, with nearly 600 passengers missing flights over four days, as recurring EES software problems combined with a rule change barring kiosk-then-eGate use. Amsterdam Schiphol saw a similar outage-driven spike to around 110 minutes in early September, while Fraport said Frankfurt's queues had eased by late September.
Despite publicly rejecting an extension, the European Commission has informally allowed France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Portugal, the Netherlands, Greece, Malta and Switzerland to keep pausing full biometric enforcement indefinitely, The Sunday Times reported on 13 September.
Palma de Mallorca has cut its average EES wait to about 30 minutes after a large increase in border police staffing, though peaks still reach 70 minutes.
Fiumicino reports average UK-traveller border time has gone from 7 to 20 minutes, and Ryanair adds Athens to its list of airports still seeing 2-3 hour EES queues.
Ryanair adds Lisbon, Madrid, Lanzarote, Milan Malpensa, Verona, Berlin, Cologne, Frankfurt Hahn and Budapest to its EES hotspot list, and Copenhagen's documented peak is revised up to 3 hours.
Brussels calls a full suspension "not possible" and "not needed" after airlines and airports warn of 4-5 hour queues; nine countries ask to extend the flexibility mechanism past 6 September.
See the live wait times for what is happening right now, or the worst airports for EES delays for documented peaks.