The most important airport has been plagued with queues so lengthy they stretched to outdoors the terminal.
The most important airport has been plagued with queues so lengthy they stretched to outdoors the terminal (Picture: Getty)
The breakdown of nearly all of the EU’s new Entry/Exit System (EES) eGates at one in all Tenerife’s foremost worldwide airports has sparked chaos, with queues so lengthy they’ve spilt onto the tarmac outdoors the terminal. Simply 5 of the 36 new biometric passport management machines – solely 15% – are at present operational.
In response to sources cited by native media, most of the EES machines have skilled technical failures since their set up in November, together with door malfunctions and connection points. Because of this, not less than a dozen models stay out of service. Ready instances have exceeded 90 minutes, sparking frustration amongst arriving passengers. Resort affiliation Ashotel condemned what it described as one more episode of extreme delays for holidaymakers, a problem the organisation says has turn into routine, regardless of repeated warnings over latest years.
The Ministry of the Inside insisted the airport is ‘working usually’ (Picture: Getty)
Ashotel has blamed a “mixture of inaction” by AENA, accountable for airport infrastructure, and the Ministry of the Inside, which oversees staffing and border-control expertise. The end result, they argue, is a type of “everlasting and systematic mistreatment” of vacationers getting into the Canary Islands, in response to Canarian Weekly.
José Fernando Cabrera, president of FAST (Foro Amigos del Sur), warned that the difficulty might trigger injury to Tenerife’s key British tourism market, describing the state of affairs as “an entrenched drawback that AENA has been unable to resolve to date”. Earlier incidents have additionally drawn complaints, with ready instances far exceeding acceptable requirements for a significant worldwide airport.
Nevertheless, the Ministry of the Inside has denied {that a} structural drawback exists, insisting the airport is “working usually”. Officers said they’ve “no report of repeated overcrowding” and attribute the delays to remoted clusters of flight arrivals and non permanent IT points.
The EU’s EES was applied at Tenerife South on November 6, making it the primary airport in Spain outdoors Madrid to implement the brand new guidelines. It launched self-service kiosks to seize facial photographs and fingerprints for non-EU travellers aged 12 and over. All non-EU or Schengen residents, together with UK travellers, now should use the kiosks for biometric registration, changing guide passport stamping.
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This rollout is a part of the broader EU-wide system, with full implementation anticipated by April 2026. The brand new system is already reside at a lot of airports throughout Europe, together with Italy’s Milan (MXP), Düsseldorf (DUS) in Germany and all airports within the Czech Republic, together with Prague.
The chaos in Tenerife comes as movies posted on social media over the previous week present three-hour queues at Geneva Airport’s passport management, as many Europeans jet off to take pleasure in its iconic winter slopes. The airport has blamed the EES at border management for “congestion […] significantly on Saturdays throughout the busy ski season,” in response to the BBC. A spokesperson mentioned implementing EES had been a “main problem for Swiss customs and Geneva Airport”, including that measures to make the method smoother included including extra employees.
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