Rome airports threaten to suspend new EU passport system to avoid summer ‘disaster’ | Airline industry

Rome airports will have to suspend the EU’s new digital border system for non-EU citizens to avoid a “disaster” during the summer months when tourism peaks, according to the head of the airports company.

The only way to avoid travel chaos over the summer is to allow passengers to bypass the biometric entry-exit system (EES), Marco Troncone said, amid warnings from other European airport officials.

Non-EU citizens, including Britons, must have their fingerprints and facial images taken when they first enter the EU, under a new program designed to control EU borders.

The system was first introduced last October and was fully rolled out in mid-April after delays and was delayed by faulty technology, leading to long queues for passengers even before the peak summer travel period, causing some people to miss their flights.

“We are very worried about the summer,” Troncone, chief executive of Aeroporti di Roma, which operates Fiumicino and the smaller Ciampino airport, told the Financial Times.

He said on a scale of 1 to 10, his concern is currently an “eight or nine.” He added: “The process is incompatible with the peak volumes we will be experiencing. So the only way is to open the valve. There is no way we can deliver 100% of registrations.”

British travelers have faced major delays in some countries, and French police temporarily suspended extra checks at the port of Dover in May. There is Greece It rescinded an earlier promise to free UK travelers from biometric checks until September.

Passengers who have gone through the EES before and should be able to skip the queues often have to go through the checks again.

Stefan Schulte, president of ACI Europe, Europe’s airports trade body. he told the BBC Earlier this week, EU governments had to decide whether to suspend the system, not the airports. He said politicians “need to stop pretending that the EES is working just fine, it’s not.”

In early May, the European Commission mentioned “built-in flexibility” that allows some functions in the EES system to be suspended.

Airline industry group International Air Transport Association (Iata), warned that queue times could reach six hours Over the summer, some airports had already recorded waits of up to three and a half hours during peak periods.

“In two months, [the system] “It is causing long queues, missed flights and increased alarm in the travel industry,” Iata said last week.

Uku Särekanno, deputy director general of EU border agency Frontex, told an industry event in London this month that the situation “may not stabilize” for two years.