Rome’s airports will suspend the new Entry/Exit System (EES) to cope with the peak summer period, Aeroporti di Roma Chief Executive Officer Marco Troncone has said.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Marco said allowing passengers to skip EES checks at Rome Fiumicino Airport and Rome Ciampino Airport was the only way to avoid ‘disaster’ in the weeks ahead.
‘We are very worried for the summer,’ he said, rating his concerns ‘eight or nine’ out of 10.
He added: “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.”
Airports Council International (ACI) Europe Director General Olivier Jankovec told the publication: “The processes need to work better. The problem is the automation. We need the self-service tills to work, and at the moment they don’t work.”
EES requires UK and other non-EU nationals to register at the border with a passport scan, fingerprints and a photo, replacing manual passport stamping with a digital entry. Once enrolled, travellers should in theory be able to pass through gates automatically on future trips.
However, queues have built up at many borders since EES became fully operational on 10 April.
Frontex Deputy Executive Director Uku Sarekanno told the ABTA Travel Matters conference in London earlier this month that it could take ‘one to two years’ for the system to stabilise, adding that member states have leeway to suspend biometric checks at busy periods until September.
ACI Europe President Stefan Schulte has also warned of the operational and passenger impact of EES, calling for coordinated action to keep border control moving smoothly this summer.
