My EES experience (MXP, non-Schengen passenger)

I’d like to preface this by saying I was panicking like fuck about the disasters I was hearing from other passengers saying there was hours and hours wait time because of EES or worse passengers getting left behind. So it’s safe to say I wasn’t looking forward to the ees experience.

So when we got off the place we entered into the hall with EES machines, E-gates and passport control. You start by going to one of the machines to register your entry as well as answering some questions about your visit. Obviously you scan your passport and have a picture taken. You are then told to proceed to an E-gate for manual checks. I was told to go to an E-gate, but it said I needed to “go back and try again”. I spoke to one of the staff who said to go through the manual checks line. Waited ten minutes handed my passport over to the border guard who took it for 2mins maybe before giving it back without a word. All in all pretty seamless on the way in and it took 20mins all in all.

On the way out I gave my self a bunch of extra time and arrived at passport control roughly 3.5hrs before my flight but was still unsure whether or not you have to use the machine again because I thought it was a one and done type thing and there wasn’t a lot of information online I could find anyway. So to be sure I asked the staff who said before proceeding through an E-gate/manual checks line you must register your exit. Where, again, scan you passport and picture taken. Here it will tell you to again, proceed to a e-gate or manual check line. Fortunately I was told to go through an e-gate and after queuing for about 10mins got to the e-gate and through with more the enough time to spare.

Now of course this all seems relatively quick because obviously the time I came in and out were quieter periods (arrived at roughly 4:30pm on a Friday, left at around 6:30am on a Sunday) clearly so this’ll vary for a lot of people.

I just wanted to share my experience as I know it’s all doom and gloom out there but once everyone gets used to and it becomes the norm it’ll ultimately be much quicker the manually being checked each time.