I flew into Prague last Thursday. Whilst I was one of the first off my plane there was no queue for the ESS registration kiosks. There was only a handful of people in front of me at border control. It was so quick that from stepping off my plane I was at Prague main station within the hour. I also had my passport stamped.
I am returning home today and zero queue again at Prague. Fingerprints were checked but this time no stamp.
Prague seems to have been well ahead of the game in installing the kit (both kiosks and scanners at entry and exit booths), and getting the system up and running.
I flew into Prague on Sunday. As well as the banks of kiosks just before immigration control, there are banks of them dotted around the airport. There are so many of them around the place I can't see anyone ever needing to queue, especially if you use one before you get to the immigration area. Passport scanned, finger prints taken and questions asked, even though I had already registered on a visit last year.
When I got to immigration, I was directed to one of the kiosks there, but they were happy to let me go straight to the immigration queue when I explained I had already used an earlier kiosk.
There were three immigration queues. EU passport holders were going through the automatic gates - no UK passport holders allowed. A separate queue for UK passport holders with CZ residency - all families with young children were being directed to these couple of booths, and were getting through quickly. And finally "others", i.e. most UK passport holders, who had to queue to have their passports manually inspected.
I queued for about 20 minutes or so, before my passport was inspected (no stamp) and I was let through. Not as bad as some waits I have had at Prague, but longer than I was expecting for a fairly quiet time on a Sunday evening. What wasn't helping was that some people needed to have their faces scanned at the booths, which was taking time. Whether these were people who had been unable to use a kiosk, or had omitted to do so, I don't know.
Note that although you only have to register once every three years, you still have to prove your identity on every entry and exit. At Prague, as I understand it, that means you use the kiosk on every entry to have your picture and fingerprints matched to your passport. Hopefully that should mean it doesn't need doing at the booth, saving processing time, and the resultant queuing.
When I left Prague last year, there were significant queues at departure, because the photographing and fingerprinting were being done at the manned booths, which was significantly increasing the time to process each passenger, with the resultant queue stretching back through the check-in hall. It will be interesting to see how things go when I depart this weekend.
Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any consistency throughout Europe. Some countries seem to be using the kiosks purely for registration, others seem to require you to use them on every entry (which should save having face and passport scanned at immigration control). Hopefully at some stage we will be allowed to use the automatic passport gates again, but I understand that is up to the UK to negotiate with each individual country.
