Originally Posted by
FredAnderssen
If the point is more lax checking of overstay, I would avoid AMS. As a resident of a certain Scandinavian country, I play a little game each time I fly through Schipol on the way home to the U.S. At pass control, I hand my passport over without presenting my residence card to see if the officer notices my "overstay." The officer has invariably thumbed through my passport, seen my length of stay, and asked what the deal was. I haven't been able to transit through AMS without presenting my residence card.
Seems like we have sort of different experiences, even as AMS passport control is certainly not as easy as CDG or FCO/MXP tend to be over such matters.
I've entered and exited Schengen from AMS hundreds of times -- primarily on the way to/from the US or UK -- on US passports, often with many others with the same kind of docs and much the same kind of travel history as myself. I've rarely showed them any Schengen country docs; however, a few times they would happen upon Schengen residency stickers/stamps -- while looking for a place to stamp my large, busy passports -- and would say that they don't need to stamp my passport because they discovered the residency status (by looking at the passport pages). Most times, they had no clue about the length of the stays or how close I was to the 90/180 day limit even when we may have been perceived to have no Schengen country residency status and stamps would perhaps be perceived as showing an overstay. Even with my small, less busy passports, it was much the same experience.