irishguy28

warakorn - cut the OP some slack. They are not a frequent traveller. In the English language, "customs" or "customs and immigration" are frequently misused and applied to any sort of "official" interaction whether on arrival or departure [and yes, departure has no implications for customs [unless you are exporting more than €10,000 from the EU, or if you are carrying potentially illicit substances!] and at departure it would be "emigration" rather than "immigration" control - but everyday speech is not always 100% accurate].

I'm sure you know BRU and I'm sure you know that all departures from Schengen airports to destinations outside Schengen require having your passport inspected just after security.

This is clearly what the OP is talking about.

I hope we can draw a line under the fact now. You are correct - the OP is wrong to say "customs". But we all know what was meant.

warakorn

The OP is talking about litigation.
Hence, it is worthwile to discuss who is to blame for the situation. This is why I was pushing for some sort of clarification on that matter.
If OP mixes up Customs with something else, she is in for some trouble in court.

If Customs forced the passenger to be inspected for an hour - without a good reason - while her plane would depart, I think OP would have a case to go against:

Algemene Administratie van de Douane en Accijnzen

LondonElite

It is pretty clear that OP meant passport control, not customs. There simply is no 'line at customs' that takes '45-50 minutes' after departures security. We are talking about the passport control that is to the right of the security checkpoints, obviously.

irishguy28

There is no question of customs officers having delayed these passengers.

and the answers appended in-line in post 7 above (highlighting is mine):

If there are such long lines at passport control, there are normally airport staff members calling people forward with flights that are departing imminently. I have experienced this in several airports already this summer, and have benefitted from this in both Dublin and Berlin in the past month alone.

I am wondering, though, how it seems that these 3 passengers appear to be the only ones who missed the flight? The OP has not mentioned any other passengers querying the gate agent, or having to retrieve their checked-in luggage or to deal with the Avia Partners handling agent. If these passengers had their bags accepted for check in - even if they were the very last to check in - they must have been present with other Aer Lingus customers who also had to pass through the same security and passport check lines - and who would therefore also have arrived at the gate too late, at the same time as these 3 pax. There would surely be others who missed the flight, then. The OP mentioned earlier about not being able to cross the whole airport in 5 minutes - I fear that, perhaps, they went astray and used the wrong security check or something. (It's a while since I've been at BRU and I don't know the airport layout since it re-opened after the bombing. But I suspect that the passengers went the wrong way somewhere along the line).

UAPremExecflyer

This seems to be the most likely scenario to me. There are quite a few confusing elements to OP's story that don't add up. Seems like they are not regular travellers, compounded by unfamiliar airport, perhaps language confusion (lost in translation?), if the lines were taking that long not speaking up is very puzzling to me. OP says arrived at 0630 for 1010 flight, which is way early. Goes to check-in (TK uses area/desk 10 - EI uses 7) and is told to come back two hours before flight. So potential advantage of early arrival morphs into disadvantage.

ajeleonard

Even though some of the details here seem to be a bit vague, it's difficult to see a successful Aer Lingus payout under EU261 here. The delay in getting to the gate seems to have either been caused by the OP, or by security and/or immigration

Danash

This little reported regulation is starting to have an impact

http://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/pr...ernal-borders/

Different airports have different policies for managing queues. I suspect that apart form the Expedia delay that the OP was caught up in a Passport check exiting the Schengen area - as per the regulation above. This will become the norm for air travel in the crazy world we live in today.

As we all know Brussels has been targeted several times so I would expect stringent checks.

I don't see a compensation claim being successful.

See here for similar angst in Madrid recently ( in Spanish )

http://www.elconfidencial.com/espana...rasos_1409043/

Referred to here....

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/ameri...ul-2017-a.html

LondonElite

I'm not sure what the relevance of all that it. OP was leaving the Schengen Area. Every airport within Schengen has passport control prior to the non-Schengen gates. It's really that simple. Either there was a really long queue (I would be surprised but I wasn't there), or OP wandered off somewhere.

Danash

In the past there was a cursory glance at a Euro passport - now each traveller can be stopped and the passport scanned and sent via the databases mentioned -- each intervention can take up to a minute or more to complete.

Even at Dublin now incoming passports are being scanned rather than nodded through ( mostly )

vvaldellon

Everyone, thank you again for all your replies.

The recurring question here appears to be about customs. One poster had it exactly right:

I was not aware that customs was entirely separate from passport control, but the line we were referring to was definitely the one where they check your passport to leave Europe. There was a separate line (much shorter) if you were travelling inside the EU but that was not the case for us.


Is this true? We have travelled in the US a few times and have been accustomed to being able to check in very early, so we were under the assumption that it was just Aer Lingus saving $$ by understaffing. I'm guessing this falls on the airport itself then?

Yes I believe this was the case. Thank you.

It wasn't just passport control, it was also (more appropriately to us) the check-in line that began only 2 hours prior to departure. That pushed everything back for us unfortunately. Only one of us (me) has travel insurance and I'm trying to help the other two.


We did ask people who were running the lines at passport control, they would repeatedly tell us along the lines of "sorry, everyone else here is in a hurry as well". We were primarily concerned about making the flight ourselves so we were not concerned about other people's flights/missing their flights. We did speak with 2 people who missed their flight as well while we were waiting for our baggage at the conveyor belts. There was a delay on getting our bags returned to us (1.5 hours of waiting in line to ask where our bags were since they did not show up on the belt), so others who may have missed the flight likely found their bags and left already.

This was more along the point that the airport is quite large, however the direction to the gate was pretty straightforward. It likely took us somewhere about 15 min total to get to the gate if we combined all the walking time.

Our flight back to the US was the weekend right after the Brussels incident, Jun 25. We had to book new flights for Mon, Jun 26. Not sure if this factors in anywhere.

yes to the former (half the crowd cheered when they opened up another window to check passports), no to the latter


Thank you again, everyone! Any advice is massively appreciated!! ^

vvaldellon

delete

vvaldellon

As frustrating as it is, I'll redo my post. Hopefully it doesn't get auto-flagged. Thanks again guys for the advice thus far. The times were all approximations. Airport cameras / checkpoints would have to verify the exact time. We returned to the check-in line at 7:45am and I recall looking at my watch around 8:50-9:00am (unsure) as we finally checked our bags in. Note departure was 10:10am and boarding was 9:40am. We cleared the security line at around 9:25am (unsure). Everyone here has been saying there are no customs, so it must be my mistake in terminology but I am referring to the line where you must show your passport (apparently called passport control). We did not finally clear this final line until 10:15 (past departure). I remember looking at my watch as we neared clearing the line. We arrived at the gate at 10:25ish where I checked my watch again.

vvaldellon

Regarding the last part, we were under the impression that it was on the airline for not staffing adequately / cramming us into a 2 hour time frame when we arrived 3.5 hours early, which led to our tickets being "cancelled" and our trip delayed at cost... It wasn't like we opted to not go to the gate, our direction was pretty straightforward, just the lines were extremely long and staff tool long to process people.

vvaldellon

We figured if we arrived early enough, no matter what size the lines were, we would be okay. And that was the case when we departed from LAX, our airline was Jetblue and they checked us in right away when we arrived 3.5 hours prior.

Check ins opening only 2 hours prior is a standard in Brussels? What about international travellers? This is why we were surprised. Airline check-ins opening so late pushes the entire schedule back...

Yes, exactly.

vvaldellon

We did try to press our case to the people handling the passport control line, and were given an off-hand comment along the lines of "everyone else in this line is also in a hurry." In hindsight, the airport staff was actually quite rude.

We went to the gate agent and queried next steps after they said our tickets were cancelled. We left immediately to baggage claim where they directed us.

There were at least 2 others that I recall who missed their flight. We saw them on the way back to baggage claim. We were concerned about our own situation however; our baggage did not show up on the belt and we ended up waiting another 1.5 hrs in line to get that sorted out. Meanwhile likely anyone else who may have also missed had likely already left.

The 5 minutes thing was more along the lines of the size of the airport. Our direction was pretty straight forward, but the way some are calculating our time seems like they're assuming we're teleporting from line to line. 15-20 minutes was likely our total walking time combined I believe.