EES, ETIAS and your Europe trip: what changes in 2026

Two new border systems are changing how an Australian passport gets into Europe, and most of what’s written about them blurs them together. The Entry/Exit System, EES, is the fingerprint-and-photo check at the border. It has been running at every external Schengen crossing since 10 April 2026, it costs nothing, and there’s nothing to do before you fly except allow more time. ETIAS is the €20 online permit. As of today it does not exist yet, no date has been set, and the only sensible action is to not pay anyone for it.

What they change for a trip is the first few hours. Day one in Europe now starts with a queue that can run from fifteen minutes to a few hours depending on the airport and the time of day, and the plan needs to absorb that. The rest of this piece says what happens at the desk, what the queues have looked like month by month, what ETIAS will ask of you when it arrives, and how we’d shape an arrival day around it.

The two systems, told apart

The EES replaces the passport stamp. On your first entry since April a border officer scans your passport, takes a photo of your face and four fingerprints, and opens a digital file that records every entry and exit after that. ETIAS is the other half: a pre-travel screening of visa-free nationals, done online, that gets linked to your passport before you board. The United States has had the same pair for years, as ESTA plus the fingerprints at arrival, and Australia asks the same of visitors coming the other way.

The 29 EES countries are the Schengen area, including Switzerland, Norway and Iceland. Ireland and Cyprus are in the EU but not in the EES, so they still stamp passports, and Cyprus runs its own separate 90-day clock. The United Kingdom is outside all of it and has its own ETA, which is a different permit with a different website.

What actually happens at the border now

The first time through is the slow one. The officer scans the passport, the camera takes your photo, you press four fingers on the reader, and you answer the usual questions about where you’re staying and when you leave. Nothing is stamped. Children under 12 give a photo but no fingerprints. The EU’s own guidance says the whole thing is quicker if you’ve pre-registered, but the only pre-registration that exists today is the Travel to Europe app, and it currently works for arrivals into Sweden, and for the questionnaire only in Portugal. For a Paris, Rome or Frankfurt arrival there is nothing to pre-register.

One thing people get wrong: the EES check happens at your first Schengen airport, not your final one. Fly Sydney to Doha to Paris to Florence and the fingerprints happen in Paris, inside your connection. A 90-minute connection that was fine in 2025 may not be fine now.

How long the queues really are

The first week was bad enough that Airlines for Europe called it a systemic failure rather than a teething problem. On 12 April at Milan Linate an easyJet flight to Manchester boarded 34 of its 156 passengers because the other 122 were still in the queue. Through April the worst documented waits at Paris Charles de Gaulle, Lisbon, Amsterdam and Geneva reached four hours, with three-hour reports across Italy and Spain.

Summer was better and still worse than before. Analytics firm Qsensor, reporting through the Financial Times in August, put peak passport-control waits at double the previous year at the big German and Dutch hubs. Brussels had the single worst documented wait, around five hours in early July.

Two caveats on those numbers. They are peaks, and the off-peak reality at most airports has been thirty to sixty minutes. And they are the first-entry year: as more frequent travellers get a file in the system, the verification-only path should take over. Several airports quietly stopped collecting fingerprints at peak times over summer to keep the lines moving, a workaround the Commission said would end in September. Expect a second bump this northern autumn as that stops.

ETIAS: what to do now

Nothing, and specifically don’t pay anyone. The official site says ETIAS is not in operation and no applications are being collected. The last published plan has it starting in the last quarter of 2026, and the Commission has said it will announce the date several months ahead. With no announcement by October, a start before Christmas looks unlikely, but that is our reading, not an official one. The only place to apply, when it opens, will be europa.eu/etias or the official app. Every site you find today offering to apply for you is either a reseller charging a margin on a form that doesn’t exist yet, or worse.

When it does start, the first year is soft by design. For at least six months travellers are asked to apply but won’t be refused entry without one. For at least six months after that you must have one, with an exception for people arriving for the first time since the transitional period ended. Only after both periods, so a year or more from launch, does a missing ETIAS mean a turned-around flight.

Transit counts for nothing. If you change planes in Doha or Singapore you were never in Europe, and if you change planes airside in Paris and stay in the international zone you don’t need an ETIAS for that either. The moment you clear the border, you do.

Planning day one around it

We’d stop pretending arrival day is a full day. The honest shape is: land, queue, get to the hotel, eat something good nearby, and keep the one booked thing for the evening or the next morning. For a first-time arrival at a big hub, that means not scheduling anything with a time on it before early afternoon.

LezPlanIt handles part of this on its own. When Lez drafts a trip it shows the journey to and from home and places day one after you land rather than at nine in the morning, and the trip’s checklist carries an entry-rules section built for your passport country. What it doesn’t do is know how long the queue at your terminal will be on the day, so say so when you shape the plan: “we land at 06:40, allow three hours for the border” is enough, and Lez moves the morning.

Two more things worth doing before you fly. Check the passport itself: it must be valid for three months past the day you leave Europe and have been issued within the last ten years, and that is checked at the same desk. And if you’ve been to Europe since April, the EU runs an online calculator that tells you how many of your 90 days are left, using what the system recorded. It won’t know about trips before 10 April, so count those yourself.