Originally Posted by
San Gottardo
C'mon...
People eligible for EU biometric controls by virtue of their EU/EEA citizenship or residence: more than 520 million
People eligible for Global Entry by virtue of their citizenship or US residence: more than 780 million
Entire population of the EAC countries: 167 million, with a much much much lower proportion/frequency of international air travel.
So I would think that GE is somewhat more relevant than any biometric control at Kigali would be. And not only for the size of the eligible population of travelers, but also for the size of the respective international air markets. Even for the readers of this forum, many of whom are not or not only French. Already many are Dutch because of the AF-KL link, so that already includes one country whose citizens can apply for GE, and then you have many Americans and Brits because of the language of this forum, so there you have another two countries with major GE-eligible population. Will there be a higher proportion of readers of the British Airways or Delta forum for whom this is relevant? Surely. Can it be dismissed as rather irrelevant in thAF forum? Don't think so.
Oh, for goodness sake, you are dragging me back into that meta-discussion to justify myself. The point I was making was, I thought, relatively straightforward, namely that, for many readers on this board, GE did not have anywhere near the same significance as APC kiosks. I did not think that this would be remotely contentious.
If I were to hazard a wild guess, I would reckon that for every reader of this particular forum for is eligible to use GE, there are probably somewhere in the region of 100 who are eligible to use APC kiosks. In other words, I would hazard a wild guess that we have two orders of magnitude of difference between the two. Admittedly, this is no more (and cannot be anymore) than a wild guess. I am not sure that it would be hugely different from what your own guesstimate would be if had to guess.
I did not say that it was irrelevant and should not be mentioned. I was just putting some context which, I think, was missing from your post in which there was no differentiation between the two and both were placed side by side. Not that there was a need for you to differentiate. That was not your point so this is not a criticism of your initial post nor was my initial post a criticism either. But that does not mean that it was improper for me to put your post in some context.
As to Kigali, clearly this was a facetious comment which I did not think anybody would take at face value. But you are right that I should have put a smilie there to make it clear. OK, can we leave the meta-discussion now?