Europe’s Entry/Exit System (EES) replaces passport stamps with a digital record of non-EU travellers entering and leaving the Schengen area. At Amsterdam Schiphol, it has also shown what happens when border technology becomes part of an airport’s daily operation.
In early September, passport-control waits at Schiphol ran to more than an hour on most days and peaked at 110 minutes, according to internal Schiphol documents obtained by Het Parool and reported by NL Times. The documents described the situation as critical.
What is EES?
EES records travel-document details and entry and exit data for non-EU nationals on short stays, and is designed to capture facial images and fingerprints. Registration at Schiphol has been mandatory since 10 April 2026. The airport installed 161 self-service kiosks, extra border-control counters and additional passenger support ahead of launch.
When the system slows, the border slows
Schiphol’s evaluation for 2 September recorded significant disruption from recurring EES outages, with waits reaching 93 minutes that day. Self-service gates were unavailable to departing UK passengers for the whole day, and Turkish passengers couldn’t use them either. Passengers missed flights and departures were delayed.
Because of the system’s limited availability, Schiphol paused the planned expansion of facial and fingerprint capture. More checks moved to staffed desks, where officers carried them out manually, and the queues there grew.
The Royal Netherlands Marechaussee, which runs border control, attributed the queues to a combination of high passenger numbers, ICT development problems and incidental EES outages. The Dutch government expects stabilising the system to take several months.
The cost lands with airlines
Queues at passport control don’t stay there. Some airlines have had to depart without passengers who were still waiting at immigration, rather than hold the aircraft and lose their slot. Missed connections, delayed departures and rebookings all fall to carriers. The Dutch airline association Barin said a border system shouldn’t be causing delays, missed connections and damage to airlines, and KLM called for more stable IT and more border capacity.
Airlines are also connected to EES directly. EES isn’t an API or PNR programme, but carriers must connect through a carrier interface to carry out required passenger checks, and register with eu-LISA, the EU agency that runs the system. An outage on that side would hit check-in the way the Schiphol outages hit passport control.
Resilience is part of compliance
EES sits alongside API, PNR, travel authorisation, visa verification and other government data requirements, each with its own systems and failure points. Meeting each requirement matters. So does knowing when a transmission has failed and what happens next.
Validation, transmission monitoring, acknowledgements and retries are the least visible parts of a digital border programme, but they keep an operation moving when a government system has a bad day. Schiphol’s decision to scale back biometrics shows the trade-off: the fallback kept the border open, but throughput suffered. Airlines should know what their equivalent fallback is before they need it.
PNRGOV helps airlines manage passenger-data requirements across multiple government programmes, validating, transforming and routing data without carriers having to keep rebuilding their underlying systems. Talk to the PNRGOV team.
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