DaveS

I went through FCO this week. The Italian e-gates are open to UK passport holders and work much better and faster than ours. The only queue was for getting the passport stamped which is at a desk after the e-gates. There was no delay either way at LGW with the e-gates working as well as they ever do on return (no queue).

lorcancoyle

it’s a convertible. You should feel the wind in your hair when the pilot decides the weather’s good enough to fold the roof down

:D!

One thing that would speed up British citizens entering the UK is to merge the manual UK/EU queue with the e-gate failure queue, and then re-split them into UK/Irish citizens and everyone else.

I have to use the manual queue as I have a child. Once we get to the officer it's very quick as they don't ask Brits any questions, but we are stuck behind large families of EU citizens who all get interrogated for 5 minutes each.

The same thing happens in the egate failure queue with EU citizens and Americans getting questioned and holding up British citizens.

So let the Brits in both of these queues go to one officer and everyone else to the other. If the officer processing citizens is free then an EU citizen can go there.

We currently have the worst of all worlds, when we go to Schengen can't use the citizen queue and when coming home the citizen queue has non-citizens.

Of course if there were 3 officers in each queue (and another 4 or 5 in the non-EU) that would also solve the problem.

Also the last two times I entered the UK, there was a uniformed BF officer standing at the end of the egate array, getting the last person in the failure queue to try the e-gate again. Most people got through. But that job could have been done by anyone and the officer could have been working at a desk for the 30 minutes I watched him.

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beachmouse

MUC this summer was the first time this USA passport holder was asked for hotel information and to show a credit card before entering the country. Haven’t been following German news super closely so we assumed there was some sort of crackdown attempt on people trying to enter the country to work illegally and that’s why it now took significantly longer than it used to.

Still generally a shorter process than an American without Global Entry trying to return to the USA.

LondonAussie

Interesting, as an Australian passport holder entering the USA recently it's been a fairly quick process and have only been asked a few simple questions like purpose of the trip, length of stay, and where I'm staying.

Never been asked to show a credit card anywhere, though entering some countries (and returning to the UK) I've been asked about occupation and employment status. Never asked for any proof, just verbal questions.

RRROOO

I dunno....I think this is a sign of the things to come. Boomers retired and the generation coming up does not want to work under the same conditions the Boomers did (8-5 job Mon-Friday ).
Customer service- human connections- all will be gone. Robot/s/ computers are on the way sooner than what you think.

lhrsfo

Clearly from the above, it’s not about Brexit at all but about how the Germans, say, choose to treat UK arrivals vs how the Italians do the same thing. It’s a peculiarly British thing to try to blame ourselves for the actions of others.

Ardecos

6 Nations rugby games were (probably still are) great for this. Scotland v France at Murrayfield = very cheap flights to Paris.

CKBA

Apologis, but BS. The UK is now part of ROTW, not EU. It's very British to see the British as being exceptional (maybe the Italians take pity on us). Coming into ARN BA now uses T5, and we have to queue along with everyone else outside the EU - annoying, but quite right. ARN T5 baggage reclaim is also a zoo compared with T2 - and the T5 lounge is poor in comparison to that of T2.

orbitmic

I think there was a suggestion to stop talking about Brexit upthread, but since you bring it back... That's simply and plainly incorrect. And indeed, British arrivals have (sadly and painfully) felt the difference on busy days when entering the Schengen area at any major border crossing in any country, from Germany to Spain, from Italy to the Netherlands, and from France to Greece, be it by air, rail, car or ferry.

Kranebitten

Plenty of useful points in the thread as well as a couple that I will charitably call less useful/factual.

With a view to helping the OP, I have a friend who regularly passes through T1 at MUC on the way to/from London for work. On exiting Schengen at T1 MUC as a third country citizen there are two issues combining: 1) obviously since Brexit UK pax are now third country nationals so need stamped out of Schengen together with other third country passport holders and 2) At T1 while there are two/three sets of border controls for exit said friend noted that only one has been available recently for third country exits, and I seem to recall one of these being small/set up mainly for EEA passport holder use at E-gates. I am not sure if there is a temporary issue there but in any event it does take longer to process those needing to be done manually and get an exit stamp - a quick look at MUC's website just now shows exit border times at T1 of 0-5 mins at EasyPass lanes (e-gates) and 5-10 mins at manual lanes.

More generally around the topic, I appreciate legal texts are quite dry but the relevant regulation on the Schengen Borders Code (SBC) (Regulation (EU) 2016/399) has all the greatest hits in there of recent weeks which seem to have taken some by surprise, including:

• entry requirements for third country nationals, which covers the passport validity questions (Art 6);
• wet ink stamping (Art 11) and;
• the optionality around separate lanes for EEA+CH nationals (Art 10).

While I don't disagree that using e-gates is helpful and quicker, it needs to be kept in mind that it is up to each country how it uses its e-gates [they are not one and the same as the separate lane aspect under the SBC, but in practice often perform that role]. Germany for example does allow citizens of certain countries to use EasyPass, but this is only on the basis of a bilateral agreement between them. As already noted, some countries like Italy have invested and decided to extend to e.g. UK nationals the use the e-gate and then get directed to an officer for any questions/stamp (again that is their choice to do so and the list of countries is also defined).

Short staffing is a problem in many parts of the world, but keep in mind the UKBF was short staffed already and so the pragmatic option (which is in the UK's gift at its discretion too) was to funnel people to e-gates.

Heathrow Tower

As has been mentioned above, the situation in Ukraine is having a major impact, exacerbating pre-covid short staffing across Europe, especially in Karlsruhe (EDUU) flight information region.

A few good resources for those interested:

Eurocontrol Network Ops Portal
https://www.public.nm.eurocontrol.in...pec/index.html
...and if you go to the NOP and click the '"Network Plan" link in top left of the Tactical tab, you get the high level network plan for the day, developed the previous evening.

See below, this is the exec summary, but then goes into quite a bit more detail.



You can also see the current situation in terms of airspace delay in the top right of the NOP Tactical tab... Click on 'Static Map' for a larger version.......

Ghoulish

Those engaging in the passive aggressive behavior of casually inflicting incendiary, controversial comments on everyone shouldn't then immediately demand the subject be dropped when the lack of intellectual integrity in said comment becomes apparent.

They should just be quiet.

fluffymitten

According to the NMIR dashboard, it seems that the MUC airspace had regulations for 'special events' and weather throughout July. Out of ~2,500-3,000 flights a day passing through that area, about 500-700 were regulated and only a rough third of those experienced a delay.

That's based on me very quickly scanning the data, not a formal analysis.

botham

Another interesting point from our trip was that as gold card holders, we had difficulties getting into the lounge, as we didn’t have a gold card, it was just noted on the boarding pass. I was okay as I was able to show my boarding pass on my app, but my wife hadn’t downloaded hers and only had the paper copy, which they reluctantly accepted. My son and girlfriend should’ve been our guests, but he had to use his priority pass.

we are generally so lucky at Heathrow, because even when flying economy we can still currently use first class check-in and security, usually allowing us to get into the lounge very quickly. At European airports, it can be a much more convoluted process.

However, I was able to check in eight members of our group at the Club desk, so avoiding a long queue for economy.

priority boarding always amuses me when they use a bus, as those unaware could be last off! (Is anyone able to help me, to let me know why the typing of a sentence starts with a small letter instead of a capital, when dictating?)