Industry Warns Over EU's 'Big Bang' Border Launch Planned for Autumn 2024

As 2023 drew to a close, the travel industry was sounding the alarm over the way the European Union intended to switch on its long-delayed Entry/Exit System (EES). Rather than phasing the biometric border scheme in gradually, Brussels confirmed it would activate every external Schengen frontier on a single day — a so-called "big bang" launch pencilled in for autumn 2024.

Evidence submitted by Ryanair to the UK parliament's European scrutiny committee, and seen by The Independent, captured the unease felt across the sector about imposing such a sweeping change all at once.

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Why the airlines were worried

In its written evidence, Europe's largest budget airline said it was not yet possible to properly test the changes to its systems, because test environments had been delayed and many of the technical requirements were either unspecified or unclear. The carrier described the wider project as having been "delayed multiple times" and "poorly managed", noting that the implementation date had already been postponed on three occasions.

A senior travel-industry figure put it more bluntly, telling The Independent that it looked like "madness" to assume every border post — from the Arctic frontiers of Norway and Russia to the southern edges of Bulgaria and Turkey — would be ready on the same day. The argument from the industry was simple: it would make far more sense to test the system one stage at a time.

Why Brussels insisted on a single launch

The European Commission held firm. Officials confirmed that "no 'soft launch' is foreseen", arguing that the coherence of the whole system depended on it starting on a common date so that everyone crossing in or out of Europe from that moment could be registered centrally. The Commission said member states should be ready by the end of July 2024, after which the exact start date would be published; France had asked for the rollout to be deferred until after the Paris Olympics.

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What it would mean at the border

EES represents the biggest change to the EU's external borders in a generation. Once live, it registers every entry and exit by "third-country nationals" — a category that now includes British passport holders after Brexit. On a traveller's first encounter, the system records fingerprints and a facial biometric; on later trips within three years, a single biometric check is enough.

The concern was always processing time. Eurotunnel estimated the average time to clear a car through the French frontier could rise from under 60 seconds to between five and seven minutes for that initial registration — a particular worry at the juxtaposed controls in Kent, where French officers check documents before travellers cross the Channel. Around six months after EES went live, a separate online permit, the European Travel Information and Authorisation System (ETIAS), was expected to follow in spring 2025. If you want the current picture of how these schemes fit together, our ETIAS overview explains the essentials.