Surely those gates are the Schengen gates and the other side are the non-Schengen gates. Your flight would have never departed from the Schengen gates
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Introduction of European Entry-Exit Scheme (EES)
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It isn't in reality. Schiphol airside is split into 3 sections, the main one for non-Schengen (Lounges 2&3, Gates D-H), and the 2 smaller ones for Schengen (Lounge 1 for Gates B&C, Lounge 4 for Gates M).
Belperpete
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As I recall, the options were for the lower numbered D gates, and for the higher numbered D gates (I think they also included other letter gates as well, but it was the split in D gates that stuck in my memory). Both options got me to exactly the same place, but one option totally bypassed passport control.
The split is exactly how the controls work, similar to Copenhagen (which I'm more familiar with). They share the same physical gates, but non-Schengen passengers use the bottom floor while Schengen passengers go upstairs to use the top floor.
In Copenhagen it's the opposite. There are gates D101-105 and D1-5. D10x involves going through passport control, then upstairs. D1-5 you remain before passport control and stay downstairs.
At some small airports (such as Dubrovnik, Salzburg from my possibly flawed observations when I went there) the same physical gates are used and the passport control is "moved" or turned "on and off" as needed.
Occasionally at busier airports with these dual floor gates, passport control may be inadvertently bypassed when staff forget to switch the doors from the Schengen floor to the non-Schengen floor. It also happens when you arrive at a bus gate if the driver accidentally delivers non-Schengen passengers to the Schengen arrival area.
Occasionally at busier airports with these dual floor gates, passport control may be inadvertently bypassed when staff forget to switch the doors from the Schengen floor to the non-Schengen floor. It also happens when you arrive at a bus gate if the driver accidentally delivers non-Schengen passengers to the Schengen arrival area.
The EU should be embarrassed by the comparison between EES and Open Balkan aka "mini Schengen". I recent visited Albania and was amazed by the border changes since the pandemic. Citizens of the other two members (North Macedonia and Serbia), along with EU/EEA, UK and US citizens can use e gates. Balkan citizens can use biometric national ID cards instead of passports. National border controls will stay because the system needs to be able to accommodate members joining EU and then Schengen at different times. Albania appears to only issue tourist visas electronically. It's a much more hi tech system than Schengen. The delay in EES means Schengen border systems are continuing to fall behind much poorer European neighbours.
I think Albania is not too concerned about illegal immigration.
When I entered from N Macedonia by road, Albanian immigration didn't even ask us to get off the bus, the bus conductor just collected all the passports.
O
One of the big drawbacks to “common standards” shared over a large area is that they become very hard to introduce and even harder to change once overtaken /outdated.
That doesn't surprise me. The actions of Albanian staff are likely below EU standards but the tech is miles ahead.
They started too late. They really should have begun at similar time to US and ESTA instead of being years behind. EES will eventually get rolled out but its embarrassingly slow. The UK was slow too but the task for one country is simpler and the choice to introduce the new system in batches of nationalities was very wise. UK ETA will have been in use for 14 months when most non European citizens start using it in January, and 17 months when EU/EEA citizens do in April. We can reasonably expect most of the teething problems to have been solved.
riceuten
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Australia is a whole different ball game, and doesn't have rail links from adjacent countries.
Cloud Strife
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Yes, the stamps were replaced with an electronic system. They still can be issued in some cases, but they're not issued to individual border police on duty.
The problem with EES is more that the trials have exposed a lot of issues that haven't been satisfactorily resolved. For instance, no-one really knows how to deal with the need for systematic fingerprinting, particularly at the busiest border crossings where it's simply not feasible. It's known that it works for some situations, such as at land borders where bus passengers can be offloaded to pass through a pedestrian border control, but not in others. There's also a lot of concern about applications such as using tablets to scan the fingerprints of people in cars.
In Lithuania, the intention is that travellers will leave their cars to register at booths located before the passport controls, but this is easier on Eastern borders where there are substantial delays caused by thorough exit checks, meaning it's easy for travellers to park up and submit their fingerprints. On borders such as FR-UK in Calais, these exit checks are significantly lighter and it's just not so easy to implement.
The latest information I've heard from my source in the Polish Border Guard is that there's a proposal to ditch fingerprinting for the time being and to focus on making sure that every entry and exit is registered. This would still allow them to ditch the most visible aspect (the passport stamps) and it would speed up things. At the same time, I've also heard that there are major issues with the responsiveness of the system, that it's taking upwards of 30 seconds to receive all the data needed, and that they still don't have defined procedures to deal with situations where someone is exiting without a corresponding entry registration through no fault of their own.
There's also an issue that the system hasn't been tested properly at the busiest border crossings. Germany in particular is very worried about how the system will work in practice in Frankfurt and Munich.
It is a huge project, and IMO, they should have separated the registration of entries/exits from the rest of it. I think they've also bitten off more than they can chew by trying to implement it everywhere at the same time, when it would've made sense to first implement it at the small border crossings such as Mali Selmency-Veľké Slemence.
I've got an exit stamp right at the very start of my new passport's first page. The corresponding entry stamp is about two thirds through, upside down and tilted sideways. It's also very smudged and barely legible. It was, as you may have guessed, stamped without the border guard so much as looking at the page!
Meanwhile UK ETA has opened for applications to all the remaining non EU/EEA nationals that don't require a visa to enter the UK. It will become compulsory for them from 8th January onwards. I wonder if Schengen citizens requiring ETA to enter UK from April will embarrass the EU into sorting out EES and ETIAS.
The first seven sets of entry and exit stamps I received when passport stamping started after Brexit are all neatly aligned and paired up, two out and two in per page.
The eighth entry takes up the third space on the fourth page, leaving one neat space free on that page for the corresponding exit.
When I exited for that eighth time the border guard didn't stamp in the remaining empty space. He stamped it sideways in the middle of page two, making five stamps on that page. He had to turn back a page from where the corresponding entry stamp was to do that. Thanks Dunkerque!
Since then it's all gone to pot and they're all over the place.
The Italians are the worst for this, especially for exit stamps.
D6130
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Yep....my recent exit stamp from Pisa Airport Is just a very faintly-printed red ink date with no details of where it was done.
YorkshireBear
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My Rome stamp is so faint it's been stamped over.
Cloud Strife
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Probably not, the issues with the EES are related to infrastructure, and Schengen simply isn't ready for it. The UK doesn't have the same issues because they already implemented their own EES years ago, but critically, the UK didn't try and implement a very complicated system involving biometrics being taken at land border crossings from all travellers. The UK, while going to a quite sophisticated backend system, accepted that exit border controls could be conducted by the carriers instead of UK Border Force. They also aren't collecting biometric data at the border, which is one of the major problems with the EES.
The Port of Dover has been quite vocal about the failings of EES, including that the promised kiosks and tablets were never delivered, and the test devices had suffered an appalling rate of failure in practice. It's also become obvious that many of the links from national computer systems to the Schengen databases weren't in place, and from what I've heard, there were severe doubts about the ability of the EU to actually check every entry and exit, especially at some crowded crossings like CDG, FRA and La Linea.
What needs to be done with the EES is to abandon the fingerprints and facial scans and simply focus on recording all the entries and exits from non-EU citizens. This will allow them to abandon stamps, which is a good first step in proving that the EES can work. From there, they can phase in fingerprinting and/or photographing by selecting travellers at random, which shouldn't cause too much problems. If it's done at random, perhaps by pulling 2-3% aside each day, the EES database will fill up with biometric data in time regardless.
The issue is scale and the general issues with a project of this scale with wholly different country, customs, laws...
The UK has a immensly smaller amount of border controls and especially a single set of laws and people, so what they do is relatively irrelevant.
No, the US does fingerprint and al. on your first entry on an ESTA just fine, if implemented correctly, it's not the issue.
Cloud Strife
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Indeed, and different practices too. CDG was notorious for years for not doing proper exit checks, and FRA was also quite notorious for simply not bothering with inbound checks. Until very recently, Spain didn't even bother doing exit checks in Ceuta, even for non-EU citizens - you had to actually hunt down someone from the Policia Nacional to stamp your passport on entry as well. It's changed in the last year however.
I suspect at least part of the problem with EES is that many of the 'old' EU countries simply weren't used to carrying out comprehensive border controls and didn't particularly see the need to systematically control people, whereas the 'new' EU countries had far harder borders after Schengen accession with functioning entry-exit registration. I remember chatting once with a Slovenian policeman at a very small local border crossing after an incredibly tough 10% hill climb on a bike, and he showed me that they had all my entries and exits registered dating back to 2011. This just wasn't the case in France, Germany, etc.
Are they now doing it at land borders as well?
It sounds like a good way forward. It was always ambitious to do everything in one go. I am surprised it was very planned that way.
I am aware it's a very different scale and challenge but I wonder how many EU visitors go the UK from 8th April will be considering that? Especially those that are more pro border controls. People will notice they need an ETA to enter the UK but no one travelling the other way needs one. There may not even be a new launch date for ETIAs when the final phase of UK ETA launch finishes.
ESTAs were not required until relatively recently, but biometrics have been collected at US land ports of entry since 2005
The EES is now planned to be introduced in a phased manner, with options to suspend the system temporarily if required.
The details are fully described in a draft regulation for a temporary derogation from some of the regulations, but here is an extract:
The details are fully described in a draft regulation for a temporary derogation from some of the regulations, but here is an extract:
Cloud Strife
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It really should have been done like this from the beginning. The sensible approach would have been to implement it on pedestrian crossings first (e.g. La Linea - Gibraltar or Veľké Slemence - Малі Селменці) where it wouldn't block traffic, and then move slowly towards implementing it at other crossings. La Linea would actually have been an ideal test ground, because not only does it have a huge amount of pedestrian traffic, but it also has the infrastructure needed to process them. Later on, local border crossings could be used, such as Unka - Unka where traffic is light and it could be tested. And so on.
They also could have limited it to only certain nationalities to begin with, just as the UK did.
== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: ==
How it works is that the same gate is used for Schengen and non-Schengen flights, but with different numbers. Once you go through passport control, you can't access the Schengen gates without entering Schengen again.
You wouldn't have been able to access the Schengen area after passing through passport control, nor would you have been able to access non-Schengen gates. Many airports now use movable walls, because having a fixed divide between Schengen and non-Schengen limits gate capacity. Even Stansted does this to a limited extent.
They also could have limited it to only certain nationalities to begin with, just as the UK did.
== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: ==
How it works is that the same gate is used for Schengen and non-Schengen flights, but with different numbers. Once you go through passport control, you can't access the Schengen gates without entering Schengen again.
You wouldn't have been able to access the Schengen area after passing through passport control, nor would you have been able to access non-Schengen gates. Many airports now use movable walls, because having a fixed divide between Schengen and non-Schengen limits gate capacity. Even Stansted does this to a limited extent.
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Cloud Strife
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Nothing yet, but I expect them to at least start using it at some border crossings in the near future. From what I've heard from my contacts in the Polish Straż Graniczna, they will continue stamping travellers until the system is 100% online, so probably not before autumn next year.
The draft regulation I linked earlier confirms that until EES is fully implemented by all Member States, stamping will continue and stamps will take precedence, even if there is data for you in the EES:
If the EU had confidence in the IT system that would have been the best option. Pick one nationality to test the system with and then go from there. UK picked Qataris because they already required the previous visa waiver (which was more invasive) and are high value tourists who appreciate a streamlined visa waiver.