Olivier Jankovec is director general of Airports Council International Europe, which represents more than 600 airports. <\/p>\n
He told the BBC the passenger processing time at border control had increased by “four to five times” under EES, with people typically waiting up to two hours. <\/p>\n
Jankovec said problems included not enough border staff, and some machines not working. <\/p>\n
He fears the situation will worsen when large numbers of holidaymakers register over Easter and summer.<\/p>\n
Markus Lammert, European Commission Spokesperson for Internal Affairs, says 23m entries and exits have already been registered under EES, and there have been 12,000 refusals of entry.<\/p>\n
He insisted the system has operated “largely without issues”, but said member states would continue to work on improvements.<\/p>\n
From 10 April, EES is meant to be in use at every border point, for every eligible passenger.<\/p>\n
However, countries can partially suspend EES operations where necessary over the summer, until September.<\/p>\n
Jankovec said this would be necessary to cope if “the situation becomes unsustainable at border control”.<\/p>\n
Without it, and if issues around the equipment and border guard numbers didn’t improve, he warned of five-to-six-hour waiting times.<\/p>\n
The group said close coordination was needed with border control authorities to make sure they could suspend the system “in a timely manner”.<\/p>\n
On Thursday, travel association ABTA said border authorities were under-using their ability to reduce checks when necessary, and said this had led to passengers being “caught up in lengthy delays”.<\/p>\n
ABTA said that as well applying the contingency measures, destinations and border authorities need to do more to plan for peak travel periods. <\/p>\n
Julia Lo Bue-Said advised people to come prepared for long waits over the February half term and beyond.<\/p>\n
“Plan for the worst”, she advises, especially at peak times. “Make sure you’ve got some refreshments, make sure you’ve got something to keep [small children] occupied”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Olivier Jankovec is director general of Airports Council International Europe, which represents more than 600 airports. He told…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":409328,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-409327","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409327","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=409327"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409327\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/409328"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=409327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=409327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=409327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}