Originally Posted by
binman
I am afraid I have to disagree with you. IMO the U.K. border checks at Heathrow rank as some of the worst in the world. I genuinely hate arriving here even with a British passport. It’s inefficient and overly intrusive and aggressive.
I personally have 60 countries under my belt and with few exceptions none operate as badly. Even the USA have managed to transform the arrival experience and I cannot recall a recent time it’s taken more than 10 minutes to process at any entry point and I don’t have global entry.0
The E gates don’t demand to know where you have come from, the purpose of your journey or, as happened on Monday where I was going having arrived home. So yes, there is additional scrutiny and questioning and it does add time and consequently frustration and delays to everyone. Questions incidentally that are answered by the APIS data provided by the inbound carrier all before my flight took off. The questions are therefore unnecessary and intrusive and simply slow things down.
Nor is it about technique. My passport works on every egate I have ever been permitted to use anywhere except here in the U.K. so why force me to use a machine I know does not work. That helps no one.
You must have been very lucky in the USA then since I've waited 90 minutes at LAX before now, probably the slowest of anywhere in the world. Once you actually get to the desk then the time is pretty much the same across the world including the UK, with the exception that pretty much the rest of the world are vastly more unfriendly than the UK - the USA are particularly bad in this respect.
The APIS data doesn't get passed to BF so how are they supposed to know? The person on the desk generally has no idea who you are or where you've come from. Having said that, assuming a UK passport then there is an absolute right of entry and questions beyond establishing whether someone is or isn't the person on a particular list for example, are unnecessary. Sometimes I've had general chatty questions from the BF person just to kill time whilst scanning the passports - this seem to happen with families where there are a number of passports to go through and presumably is better than a long period of silence which probably seems unfriendly.
I've said before that comparisons with other countries aren't valid. If you have a British name then it's far more likely that there will be a potential match with a name on a British list, than if you have an Italian name for example. The reverse is also true, so John Thompson is unlikely to match up to a Spanish or Italian watch list in the same way that Giuseppe Bianchi is less likely to match up to a name on the UK list.
The people in the pink shirts don't seem to like people switching queues halfway through - which I totally get, as I imagine it annoys the hell out of all those people who have been queueing in front of you. You could always go straight into the EU (Non eGate) queue rather than trying to switch halfway through. At T2 that's more difficult since you can't see the eGate queue until you get closer and you need to have made the decision by then, so you might have made a poor decision if you find yourself behind a load of families with an empty eGate queue, but at T5 you can see the queues as you go into the hall. If asked then you can just say that you don't have an eligible passport or you aren't eligible to use the gates (a truthful response if you are rejected every single time without fail).