Thank you for letting me know.

It never ceases to amaze me the irony of the fact that Sweden, Norway etc are very zealous in enforcing their external border, but have agreed to trust Portugal, Italy etc to also enforce their external border who have a totally different approach to allowing non-EU/EEA citizens in. If one really was desperate to go to Sweden and cause problems, they could just fly to Italy, Portugal etc shoot through an E-Gate and take a flight to Sweden without any checks on the other side.

With all the Omni pr comments about USA border staff, it’s nice to know that there are also challenges in Europe.

maybe uk uses Gates for quicker entry so that tourists will be more eager to spend big tourism money.

The UK does it for purely practical reasons, in that if it didn't, it would either need to increase the number of border staff by an order of magnitude, suffer enormous queues, or both.

The times that EU passport holders are turned away at the E-Gate and sent to a uniformed officer, they get a proper grilling from what I have witnessed at LHR.

I think it has less to do with protecting borders than petty officials flexing their muscles.

Guardian and Times reporting that the EU are going to let UK passport holders use EU/EEA/CH queues again as part of this new deal being announced on Monday. Not sure how that is going to work in practice.

What’s the gain here? I thought that this was always going to be the case when the EES system
launches , and not just for UK citizens but all other citizens who have registered. Or did I misunderstand?

Back to bad EU immigration experiences - had a grilling (fast fire question round) at Rotterdam arriving from LCY, usual why was I visiting, what festival was I attending, why did the festival ticket say Thursday to Sunday and it was now Friday. Very unfriendly peed off agent. Oslo also quite thorough last week but pleasant, I gifted her my BA highland shortie for her tea break.

correct. although based on the multiple delays already, i wouldn't bet anything on the currently scheduled october start for ees.

some places already allow egate use on entry, with someone to stamp passports afterwards.

yes it is unclear what the agreement actually means. stamps are still required, and it celarly still leaves it up to each country and their own discretion whether uk passport holders can now use egates. my suspicion is nothing will actually change as a result of this agreement.

Agreed, I think little will change passport control-wise.

The restrictions on food might drop away though.

Just before Christmas while entering at AMS from a USA flight on Italian/EU passports we were asked by the border agent how long we were staying in the EU, which was very odd (there were no e-gates available). I mentioned we were connecting to a flight to CTA and staying at home a few weeks at least (it was not a RT ticket). We were handed back the passports after being scanned in, but it was a bit odd. Seemed more than just small talk though we were scanned in.

That was a first for me re-entering the EU. Eventually exiting in FCO the auto-gates worked and no agent was needed. As an aside, the line for non-EU passports was around two corners and about to clog up the security lanes at FCO so I felt for people trying to leave that morning.

I've regularly seen Italian officials wave through or not stamp US passports and then seen angry Germany exit guards when told the Italians did not stamp the passports.

Italian Airports normally allow Brits, Americans, Israelis, Canadians, Australian and Nzers to shoot through E Gates.

My last three trips through FCO in the last four months all had them going via the normal immigration lines. No idea why, I used my Italian passport so did not dig too much or ask, but the lines were very long each time I passed through. I'll have to chat up the staff next time and see why.

Interesting!
I have not used FCO since 2023 to be fair, but flew through there a lot over 2022 and 2023 and always used an E-Gate with a UK passport. I also used E-Gates at MXP late last year.
I use LIS a lot, and usually I use E-Gates but sometimes they shut all the E-Gates (even for the EU citizens) and everyone has to use the lines.

In my very limited experience, AMS seems to be the outlier in always asking questions (for US citizens) entering the EU. In other locations, I just get stamped without a question.