Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Corder. It's Thursday the 28th of May.

So a lot of people still away on their half-term holidays waiting to see what happens when they fly back from various continental airports in terms of the entry-exit system.

Will they get their fingerprints and face done, even though the rules say they should

only have one of them checked?

Will they have nothing apart from a quick skim of the passport?

Well, frankly, who knows?

A person, indeed, is Dr Nick Brown, data sleuth who knows far more than

anybody else ever will about the entry-exit system. So he is a very good person to tell me

what has gone wrong? I think it's a whole combination of things that go wrong when large organisations and governments try to put in place big systems with ambitious plans.

In some places EES is working absolutely like clockwork.

In others, it isn't.

In some cases we hear stories of the national authorities doing the wrong thing.

In other cases we hear of technological chaos. I live in Mayorka and when I go to Palmer Airport, everything seems very,

very well-organized and run. The machines are working. People are giving the right amount of

biometrics. And when they leave, they don't even have to go to the

famous EAS kiosks because the EGate does all of the exit formalities for them so it's absolutely

possible to do it right and I don't know I think this is what happens when you ask 28 29 governments

to implement an EU regulation using technology that they haven't done before.

And especially, and I think this is the key thing with Brexit, EES was never designed to be

implemented at 400 airports. It was designed to be implemented at 30 or 40 big airports where

the planes come in from the Gulf, North America and the Americans and various other

nationalities get off the plane. Had Brexit not happened, you go through passport control when

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