THE summer of warned EES chaos is almost upon us – but two airports are set to scrap the new entry rules for Brits.
Both Rome Fiumicino Airport and Rome Ciampino Airport could suspend the requirements to avoid length queues at passport control.
Talking to the Financial Times, Aeroporti di Roma Chief Executive Officer Marco Troncone said that allowing passengers to skip EES checks is the only way to avoid “disaster”.
He added “we are very worried for the summer” and rated his concerns an “eight or nine” out of 10.
Marco Troncone said: “The process proves to be incompatible with the peak volumes that we are going to face.
“So the only way is to open up the valve. There is no way that we can deliver 100 per cent of the enrolment.”
These two Italian airports can be particularly busy during the summer period.
Rome Fiumicino Airport sees over five million passengers per month during the peak summer travel season.
In recent years, numbers have been as high as 180,000 in a single day.
Rome Ciampino Airport is a little quieter but can still see up to 3.9million total passengers per year.
During the summer, there are estimates of up to 400,000 passengers per month through the airport, according to Aeroporti di Roma.
EES requires UK and other non-EU nationals to register at the border with their biometrics and will replace manual passport stamping.
But since their introduction there have been reported issues which have caused up to six- hour queues through airports.
Another issue was raised by Olivier Jankovec, head of the airports industry group ACI Europe.
H said that one of the biggest problems is that the self-service EES points “don’t work”.
He also said that there is congestion caused by a lack of organisation.
Once enrolled with EES, travellers should be able to go through gates automatically on future trips without needing to use the machines again.
But at the moment, lots of airports haven’t introduced separate queues for those who have already completed EES checks which is adding to wait times.
Queues at passport control have been so long at some airports that passengers have missed flights.
Earlier this month, a Ryanair flight was forced to leave up to 50 of its passengers behind when they were stuck in Athens Airport in what they dubbed a ‘mega queue’.
In April, an easyJet flight left Milan Airport without all of its passengers who were stuck in border control queues.