‘It's inhumane': The airports making passengers queue for up to five hours
Will you be thanking Sir Keir Starmer this summer? The beleaguered prime minister has made much of his diplomatic deal with EU bureaucrats to allow British travellers to use e-gates when travelling to the Continent, thus avoiding unnecessary queues when heading off on holiday.
While it's true that some of the more doom-laden predictions of travel chaos after Brexit haven't come to pass, regular travellers can attest to the fact that winding passport queues aren't exactly unknown at European airports.
Just look at the recent scenes in Portugal, where British travellers have been left waiting in line for up to three hours in order to show their documents.
Faced with a backlash from frustrated travellers, Portuguese authorities have been quick to blame the situation on temporary problems with their security systems.
Though Algarve regulars may have noticed that the situation in Faro seems to be a carbon copy of what happened last year, when some travellers reported that only a handful of passport booths were open.
So does Portugal bag the dubious honour of having Europe's worst airports when it comes to passport queues? The data on delays isn't fully comprehensive, but there are indicators that suggest that the Iberian nation has some stiff competition on that particular front.
A special mention here must go to Brussels Airport, which surely has to take the prize for queuing time – with reports of a staggering five-hour slog earlier this year.
'After a long flight, it's inhumane to expect us to stand for that long,' one frustrated passenger told the Brussels Times earlier this year, in what may have been a deliberate appeal to the EU capital's tradition of protecting human rights.
It's true that, as with other European airports, the long lines aren't a permanent feature. But grumbles on social media suggest that they are occurring often enough to cause serious headaches. This has led Belgium's interior minister – the equivalent of their home secretary – to demand that federal police come up with a plan for reducing the queues and restoring sanity.
How did things get so bad in the first place? Despite welcoming some 24 million passengers per year, Brussels doesn't even rank among the Premier League of busiest European airports when it comes to passenger numbers. But the city's status as the EU capital, and its historic colonial links, means that it receives a disproportionate amount of flights from outside of the continent, many of which require longer visa checks.
That's clearly bad news for British travellers who, at present, have to stand in the same line as those arriving from the likes of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Cameroon and Burundi, all of which have regular flights to the Belgian capital with Brussels Airlines.
For an insight into how regularly things can go wrong when it comes to passport queues, just look at Charles De Gaulle Airport in Paris. The granddaddy of European airports might not have it worse than other major hubs on the continent, but it does publish detailed briefings on waiting times and delays.
When you look at the most recent incident reports, you can see that the most common cause of passport delays is the most predictable one: a shortage of border guards. Combine that with heavy traffic during busy periods like school holidays and it's not uncommon to see two or three days per month where waiting times spike to around an hour.
The data also shows how major sporting events contribute to airport chaos. Last summer, there were queues of up to 80 minutes during the days before the Paris Olympics, as the airport was forced to divert resources to service the arriving VIP delegations. During the 2023 Rugby World Cup, passengers queued until 1am – more than one hour after the last flight of the evening.
When you speak to frequent flyers, you'll find that most have their own candidate for the tardiest airport for passport control. 'Madrid is one airport where I've experienced delays,' says Rob Burgess, editor of loyalty point bible Head for Points. Like Brussels, the airport receives a lot of traffic from outside of Europe, with a barrage of direct flights from Central and South America.
'Unfortunately, a lot of the biggest queues correlate to those destinations where large volumes of British holidaymakers go,' says John Strickland, aviation expert and founder of JLS Consulting. 'Right now, Portugal and Spain seem to be particularly bad for long and slow-moving queues.'
That's certainly the case in ever-popular Tenerife, where this year's holiday season kicked off with the now familiar tradition of hefty passport queues at the airport. Back in May, there were reports of British passengers waiting for up to two hours in the sweltering heat as families jostled for bottles of water to keep them cool.
In response, Spanish authorities have pledged to increase the number of border guards so they can process travellers more quickly. With the school holidays just around the corner, we should see if the plan has worked.
In the meantime, will Sir Keir's e-gates deal come riding to the rescue? Not quite. For all the fanfare around the announcement, ministers have confirmed that the current arrangements will not change until later this autumn, when the EU is finally set to unveil its long-awaited digital border system (known as the EES, or Entry Exit System).
Even then, it will depend on the discretion of individual countries whether British nationals will qualify for the e-gates. And that's assuming that the system doesn't succumb to technological gremlins on the particular day you arrive. Passengers who arrived at Heathrow or Gatwick on May 7 last year saw the chaos that can unfold when the e-gate system is hit by a technical outage.
Until then, hopeful travellers can look on the bright side: data from Paris and elsewhere suggests that 90 per cent of travellers will breeze through the passport gates in less than 15 minutes. Even those smaller airports in the Canary Islands can manage the traffic the vast majority of the time.
But for the minority who end up drawing the short straw this summer, it could prove to be a very testing start to their holiday.
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