August 29th - Entry-exit system begins 12 October – and these could be the worst-affected European airports

Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast

The Independent

Places & Travel, Leisure, Society & Culture

3.6 • 628 Ratings

🗓️ 29 August 2025

⏱️ 8 minutes

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Summary

From 12 October, the EU's much-delayed entry-exit system (EES) will begin to be rolled out. Using some mathematical modelling, Oliver Ranson from Airline Revenue Economics has worked out the European airports most at risk of collapse on first contact with the EES. Milan Malpensa, Bucharest and Athens top the chart.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's Friday the 29th of August,
0:08.2	which I calculate means that it's around 40 days before the entry exit system begins. This is the
0:17.8	European Union's much delayed plan to require people who are crossing the Schengen border and who are not citizens of either the EU or the Schengen area countries, which is Switzerland, Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway, to give their facial biometric and fingerprints when crossing for the first time.
0:42.3	After you've done that, then it will simply be one of those biometrics, and that's almost always going to beat the base.
0:50.2	If you've been travelling through European airports this summer, you may well have seen these
0:55.7	lines of machines, kiosks, that are queuing up, waiting under wraps to be put into service,
1:03.9	and basically 180 people get off a flight from the UK, and they can all queue up and give
1:10.3	their biometric details. That's the theory,
1:14.5	but how is it going to work in practice? Oliver Renson, who runs airline revenue economics,
1:23.3	has actually been looking into this and joins me now. Hello, Oliver. Hello, Simon. It's great to be here.
1:30.0	You have done some remarkable mathematical modelling on what could go wrong when the entry-exit system
1:39.8	starts. So, let's begin with the basics. I arrive in an airport somewhere in the European
1:46.6	Union. Yes, it's going to take longer because you can have to go through this procedure
1:51.7	and they're still going to have to read and stamp your passport manually. That's going to be a
1:57.7	fath. But why is it a particular problem? Almost every airport in Europe, Britain and anywhere in the world today is very well run when things are going normally.
2:10.6	Their terminals, their arrivals, their IT is all designed and optimized so that when planes are arriving on time, when they're
2:21.2	leaving on time, and when people are coming into the arrivals hall at the rate which
2:26.4	is expected and well understood and are quickly processed, everything goes smoothly.
2:32.1	That doesn't mean that you're not going to have to queue a bit.
2:35.4	Airports and airlines expect that there are going to be key users at some times of the day.
2:39.2	They just can't build a arrivals hall which is big enough and employ enough staff to get everybody through without waiting.
2:48.5	But hopefully most of the time people don't have to queue for too long.
	...

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