Rome's European Entry System

There are many recent discussions on this topic. Take a look:
https://search.ricksteves.com/?button=&date_range=6m&filter=Travel+Forum&query=Rome+EES

We recently flew in to FCO. After deplaning, passengers were directed to kiosks for passport scanning and fingerprinting. The fingerprinting component of the process would not work for many of the passengers. They were instructed to proceed to manual processing. Upon arrival at that point, ALL passengers were required to stand in the same queue, and then had to repeat the entire passport scanning and fingerprinting process all over again. The wait time in that line was slightly less than 2 hours. Very frustrating.

The fingerprinting is probably going to be the bottleneck.. To get a good scan several things have to happen.

1- clean scanner screen
2- proper finger positioning
3- proper finger pressure
4- prints that are easily "scannable"

When I went to apply for Pre-check it took at least 2 tries for my prints and 3-4 times for my wife. Hers have always been a problem. The photo was easy.

I expect it will be awhile before "it was a breeze" becomes the typical/normal report

When we did it in Bologna there were about 5 assistants and 15 or so terminals at which to get scanned. They bounced around and helped people who were stuck at some point in the process. Then they tagged our passports and we went back to regular screening, photo IDed and then get stamped as always. (The stamping will stop at some point replaced by the ID system and may already have been in Rome.)

In theory once you're in the system you will be able to proceed to passport control, get scanned and walk out into Italy. I suspect there will also be a point where many people have been put into the system but others won't have been and filtering weary travellers into the correct areas will probably become an issue.

You will also be IDed going out of the country since the whole point of the system is to a cohesive system around all the included countries borders in one system. We were IDed again at the international outbound passport control terminal just before boarding our flight.

Hopefully it won't be a busy time when you land and you'll get registered into the system with minimal wait times. I think it probably added 15-20 minutes to our entry in Bologna but it essentially just our plane as far as I know.

Good luck,
=Tod

It can be quick or long with no accurate way to predict what your experience will be. Hint: if you can’t press hard enough for your fingerprints to register, add pressure by pushing down with your other hand.

Marrone!!

Good thing I don't have to be anywhere. Fortunately, for our March flight from Chicago arrives at 7:45 AM, and we might not be able to drop our bags at the AirBnB until 11:00. So we've got nothing but time...

So...pushing your finger down on the fingerprint thing with your other hand. But I guarantee the Fiumicino employees' shoes are shiny and they look like they just stepped out of a movie! Gotta love it!

My advice is not to give up the first time it doesn’t work and it says to go to manual processing, keep trying.

The kiosk will show you which of your fingers are not scanning properly by showing them in red and then you’ll know to push down harder on those fingers.

Also know what questions they are going to ask you ahead of time so that you are prepared with the answers. When it asks your departure date, they do not mean from that first initial city.

The departure date question is asking when is your final departure date back to the US? This was confusing to us at first because we entered one country and left it on the same day, it was just a transfer country.

FYI, Italy is one of the countries that has been allowed to delay EES implementation further, so at FCO it may be functional. Or not. https://community.ricksteves.com/travel-forum/general-europe/some-countries-allowed-to-delay-ees-implementation.

The problem with speculating about how much time it will take, is that on a given day the lines might be long when many planes arrive, or non-existent Hope for the Best, Plan on a longer wait?!

I am currently sitting in the Helsinki airport. Just came off a lovely Finnair nonstop from Seattle, connecting here onward to Rhodes (Greece). BTW, the airport vibe here is wonderful - uncrowded, relaxed, modern, sleek, functional, no drama, and I dare say downright pleasant - my first impressions are that this is a great place to connect through (we will be back). But with an unconventional (creative) routing and flying on 2 separate tickets and just a little over 2 hours to connect, possible delays from backed-up EES was something I had been concerned about.

We went through EES with zero waiting (like at airports elsewhere, there were dozens of idle machines all lit up but still unused), there were plenty of human staff processing arriving passengers, and everything seemed to be working flawlessly (including the fingerprinting, even though my spouse has previously had trouble with fingerprinting when going through the US Global Entry approval process).

For us, here, today (15 minutes ago) EES took no more than a minute for each of us. Can’t ask for much more than that.

YMMV, but at least in my case, the official Finnish government policy of promoting happiness seems to be working. 👍🏻