Airports and airlines have blamed the new border control system — which requires travelers from non-EU countries to register their biometric data — for hours-long queues, operational disruption and missed connecting flights.
“There’s still quite a lot of work to do to have these technical issues solved together with the member states,” von der Leyen said.
The comments mark a shift in tone from the Commission, which had downplayed disruption linked to the EES. “In most EU airports, this impact is indeed limited,” Markus Lammert, the Commission’s spokesperson for internal affairs, said Wednesday.
The Commission said earlier this year that registering an entry or exit typically takes about 70 seconds.
The aviation industry sees things very differently.
Since the EES became mandatory, “waiting times at border control have increased significantly, now reaching up to five hours during peak traffic periods,” airport lobby ACI Europe and airline groups IATA and Airlines for Europe wrote in an open letter to von der Leyen on Wednesday.