EES and Faro airport wait times

Arrivals or departures?

The airport website is not helpful on this. And the bad news is that Faro has a disproportionately high number of UK flights on which almost every body has to go through the process. The airport closes for the night in just over 4 hours and there are still 22 scheduled (not delayed) flights to the UK to go compared to 28 to EU/Schengen airports across the rest of Europe.

What is your itinerary? Are you sure you will do immigration in Faro?

If so, your advantage maybe will be that it is a small airport, so there will be no lines of hundreds of people. Of course, smaller airport means less staff to deal with surges in volume...so who knows. The EES process really adds little more time in theory, but in some cases people are having problems with the new system, the systems themselves still a little wonky, and maybe some redundant processing.

I will be arriving in Faro from Canada.

A lot will depend on whether you are in row 7 or row 35, and what other flights from non Schengen points ( e.g. UK)
may have arrived just ahead of yours.

I have been seeing a number of reports of long wait times to go through passport control in Faro. In Lisbon and several other European countries, too. This new EES has created huge backups when a number of international planes land in a short time frame. As the other poster noted, Faro has a large number of UK flights, which all have to do passport control since Brexit.

It really depends on how many other international flights are arriving at the same time.

If you really want to dig into it, you could look at arrivals on the day and time you arrive to get some type of idea.

There is also a Travel To Europe app you can complete before arrival that purports to help.

arrivals could be slightly easier, partly because you won't be worried about missing your flight and partly because the process is faster for people who already been entered in the system on an earlier visit, which reduces the queue for first timers who need to enter. Departures is the same process for all involved and some airlines are starting to give up waiting for those stuck in queues.

“ Faro has a large number of UK flights, which all have to do passport control since Brexit.”

Even before Brexit, UK citizens had to go through passport control upon arrival in Portugal. This is because while the UK was an EU member, they were never part of the Schengen Zone. What has changed since Brexit is that UK passport holders can no longer use the separate line for EU citizens. And since the start of EES, they also have to register for that.

Do you have to go throught ESS on arrival and departure ? How long ahead of my flight do I need to be for a departure from Faro ? Or Lisbone ?

Entry/Exit System (EES)
https://travel-europe.europa.eu/en/ees

"Exit": is in the name.

Dutch Traveler - I stand corrected. I had actually forgotten having to do passport control to go to Scotland long before Brexit.

Kathryn
you've probably forgotten because in those days they barely looked at your ID or passport on an exit check (IF they did one!), they tended to leave that to the check in staff. Even arrival checks were little more than a glance at the photo. The only pre Brexit exit check I can actually remember was when they were trying to introduce self service scanning at Munich airport and it didn't work!! Now the passport has to be scanned in both directions, which means the software process has to be run each time, this may only take a few seconds for each passenger but it all adds up. On the subject of adding up, that's why they are now doing proper checks in each direction - to see whether your accumulated stay in the Schengen zone has reached 90 days in the last 365.