Just wait until you fly to a Nordic country.

I am an EU (Italian) citizen, thus it seemed very odd to me.

agreed, definitely questions as we did our status presentation run with SAS

AMS is just forever variable. There's definitely always a "where are you going" but I just give a town and say giving training for 3 days and I'm through in seconds. On Sunday I made it from the ariival gate to the train platform in 8 minutes including border and customs (UK passport).

I arrived at FCO late at night four weeks ago. I was directed to see a border police officer in a booth. There was no one ahead of me in line. The whole thing took less than a minute; I don't recall noticing the E-gates. My daughter arrived the next morning. She used an E-gate, but then had to have her passport stamped by an officer at immigration control. When we left last week, the E-Gates were not functioning. We passed through them and directed to see a border police officer. This time, including the wait to see the immigration official, it took approximately a minute to clear exit control.

If I was not clear, sorry, I was talking about departing FCO. I have no idea on arrival as I always use the E-gates for Italian Passports, but even on arrivals I did see some lines. Nothing like departures, to be fair, but a small wait it seemed.\
The departure lines were so long many people were worried about missing flights. made for an empty lounge though LOL

Going through exit passport controls at FCO on a weekday morning, around 9:30 am, in the T3 area from where non-stop US bound flights depart, there may have been three people ahead of us in line and two passport control officers processing the Schengen exits.

Good to hear for my American and British passport colleagues. Here in Italia the pendulum usually swings far one way or the other. For many years I have seen them waving through scores of entering American passport holders without even giving them stamps ( to the consternation of many a German border guard) to now the reverse and making non-EU line up for scrutiny.

Maybe it had to do with the holidays and Jubilee starting since December and January were when I saw the longest lines at exit; all my other very recent entries have been NAP or CTA and that is just so fast for me regardless of other happenings I don't see the other lanes.

on Friday evening in AMS apparently the sign said the wait for non EU passports was 45 minutes !

no idea what the actual wait was - my sister breezed through with an EU passport !!

At AMS (and BRU) it is not unusual at peak times, it's more to do with staff shortages with the Border Marshals than anything else (BRU it's more the layout / lack of space in the corridor). It sometimes get to 1 hour. Moreover having an EU passport doesn't necessarily help: because of the staff shortages they often don't staff the e-gates either, and so while there is a manual line for EU+ citizens, it can be as slow, or even slower, than the main non EU queue. Off peak then 20 minutes is more typical.

Since the UK-EU announcement, Finland is now allowing British citizens to use E-Gates.

https://www.finavia.fi/en/airports/h...border-control

we already could and were doing so in HEL - there are a few e gates signed for UK/US/JP with someone to stamp your passport afterwards.

They are now allowing British citizens to use them for entry though before was exit only. Only Japanese citizens could use them for entry as TCNs.
British could use them before for exit as you say.

Also it now appears that PRG is allowing British citizens to use them for entry and exit from what I have been told.

It now appears to be

For Entry and Exit: France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Hungary, Cyprus, Czechia and Finland
For Exit Only: Netherlands, Belgium

My understanding is the UK Government has been lobbying Netherlands, Germany and Greece over this so maybe some changes there soon? Lets see

i have used them for entry before at HEL though as noted above. there is nothing new here. i am resisting making any political comment, but this whole thing is the biggest nothing burger dressed up as an everything salad.

Ahh okay! When I went last year it was Japanese for entry, and Brits/Americans/Japanese for exit. I noticed the website only updated recently so assumed it was down to the political declaration but it must have just been that they were slow to update it.

When I was in Prague in May, I could not use the gates but a friend used them the other day so I at least have some hope Czechia was responding to this declaration otherwise it was a total scam of an announcement.

I flew into ARN last week. The "all other passport" lines weren't terribly long, but each line was quite slow because every person/group was getting grilled by the border agents. The family of five in front of me eventually had to pull out printed documentation of the hotel they would be staying at. A young American woman at the booth next to them was there for at least 10 minutes answering who knows what kind of questions. Even with me speaking Swedish, I got asked a few more detailed questions than my previous visits--nevertheless, I was through in under a minute.