Around 100 British travelers were left stranded at Milan's Linate airport on Sunday after passport control delays, linked to the European Union's new biometric Entry/Exit System, prevented them from reaching their gate in time for an easyJet flight to Manchester. The Daily Mail reported that passengers were vomiting and nearly passing out in the heat as queues stretched for hours, with no apparent plan from airport or border authorities to manage the crush.
EasyJet delayed the flight by 52 minutes, but the plane ultimately departed half empty. Only about 30 passengers made it on board, according to witness accounts. The rest, families with young children, students, couples on holiday, were left behind with no clear path home and little help from anyone in charge.
The scene at Linate was not an isolated breakdown. Travelers returning to the UK from Lisbon, Geneva, Malta, Paris, Brussels, and Amsterdam all reported similar delays and cancellations over the same weekend. The common thread: the EU's Entry/Exit System, or EES, which now requires travelers from non-EU countries, including the United Kingdom, to submit fingerprints and photographs when entering the 29-country Schengen Area. The system is being rolled out in stages, with full operation expected from April.
What Brussels designed as a digital upgrade to border security has, so far, delivered something closer to a bureaucratic pileup, and the people paying the price are ordinary travelers who followed every rule and still missed their flights.
The passenger accounts from Milan paint a grim picture. Kiera, a 17-year-old student traveling with her boyfriend, said she arrived at Linate at 7:30 a.m. for an 11 a.m. departure, more than three hours early. She described hitting a massive queue at border control and waiting until about 10:50 a.m., when airport staff finally brought water to the crowd. By the time she reached the front, it was too late.
"At about 10.50am they brought some water over for people, and when we got to the front of the queue someone asked us if we were going to Manchester, and told us our flight had just gone."
Kiera said she and her boyfriend were facing a 20-hour wait for another flight. Her mother paid £520 for a replacement. EasyJet, she said, offered £12.25 in compensation.
Vicky Chapman, 26, from Wirral, was traveling with her partner Adam Hoijord, her five-year-old son Fredrik, her mother Lynne, and her brother Dan. She said they reached their gate by 9:30 a.m., well ahead of the scheduled departure, but were refused entry through passport control.
"We were then told that we are a 'no show' on our flight because we did not get to the gate on time, even though passport control had issues and they would not let us through."
Chapman described conditions inside the airport as dangerous. People were vomiting. Others nearly passed out. The family spent three hours being shuffled between airline and airport staff, with no one accepting responsibility. The earliest available return flight, she said, was two days later, and it would land at Gatwick, not Manchester. The family had to pay out of pocket for an Airbnb.
Airport disruptions are nothing new, but the pattern here matters. When TSA lines spiraled during the DHS shutdown in the United States, at least the cause was a temporary funding lapse. In Europe, the chaos is the direct and foreseeable result of a permanent new system that authorities chose to deploy without adequate staffing or infrastructure to handle the load.
Adam Lomas, 33, was holidaying in Milan with his wife Katy and their baby daughter. After being stranded, he tried to contact easyJet by phone. The airline's chatbots, he said, "hung up" on him after "five or 10 minutes" because of "audio issues" where the system claimed it couldn't hear him.
Lomas offered a blunt summary of the response from both sides: easyJet and the airport had "spent hours arguing with each other about who is to blame." His family was trying to book new flights to London and then take a train north to Manchester.
EasyJet, for its part, acknowledged the problem but framed it as someone else's failure. A spokesperson said the airline had been "doing all possible to minimise the impact of the airport queues," including holding flights and offering free transfers for passengers who missed their departures.
"We continue to urge border authorities to ensure they make full and effective use of the permitted flexibilities for as long as needed while EES is implemented, to avoid these unacceptable border delays for our customers."
The airline added: "While this is outside of our control, we are sorry for any inconvenience caused." For a family sleeping in an Airbnb in Milan with a five-year-old, waiting two days for a flight to the wrong airport, "inconvenience" may not quite capture the experience.
The situation recalls the way American travelers have been caught in the crossfire of federal dysfunction, as when ICE agents stepped in to slash wait times at Atlanta's airport after bureaucratic failures left passengers stranded in security lines. In both cases, the people who suffer are not the officials who designed the system but the families trying to get home.
Milan was the flashpoint, but the disruption stretched across Europe. Rupert Joy, a former UK and EU diplomat, posted on X about conditions at Lisbon's airport.
"Complete chaos at Lisbon airport. Loads of people missing flights despite arriving hours in advance because of insanely long queues to passport control. No one seems to be in control or to have any idea what to do."
Another traveler described the scene at Lisbon: "Having the machines at the start of the queue before going through passport control just caused a massive queue leaving Lisbon." At Paris's Charles de Gaulle airport, a parent traveling with a child under 12 reported queuing for more than two hours with at least a hundred people still ahead. At Milan's other major airport, Malpensa, another passenger wrote: "Two hours after landing and I'm still an hour from clearing passport control."
Brussels airport told customers to expect delays. Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam confirmed "long queues" on its website on Monday. Travelers heading home from Malta and Geneva reported similar problems over the weekend. UK holidaymakers were warned of delays lasting up to four hours.
Ryanair chief executive Michael O'Leary went further, accusing the EU of using the new system to punish British citizens for Brexit. O'Leary said there had been "significant disruption" at passport control since the EES was first introduced in October of the previous year. He called the rollout "a s*** show and a shambles." He also claimed Britons were being subjected to longer waits as "payback" for leaving the EU in 2020.
Whether O'Leary's accusation of deliberate retaliation holds up or not, the practical result is the same: British travelers are bearing the brunt of a system that European authorities launched before it was ready. The EES requires fingerprints and photographs from every non-EU traveler entering the Schengen zone. That is a significant new processing burden, and the airports plainly lack the capacity to handle it without creating hours-long queues.
The answer, for now, is the passengers. Kiera's mother paid £520 for a new flight. The Chapman family paid for emergency lodging. Adam Lomas and his wife scrambled to rebook through London and arrange a train to Manchester, all while caring for an infant. EasyJet's reported offer of £12.25 in compensation barely covers a sandwich at an airport terminal.
The airline's official statement urged border authorities to use "permitted flexibilities" during the EES rollout. That language suggests easyJet knows the system isn't working and that workarounds exist, but that the authorities responsible for passport control aren't using them. Whether that reflects bureaucratic rigidity, staffing shortfalls, or something more deliberate, the Daily Mail's reporting does not resolve.
What it does show is a pattern familiar to anyone who has watched government agencies roll out ambitious new programs without the resources to execute them. The vision is grand. The implementation is a mess. And the people left holding the bag are the ones who followed the rules, showed up hours early, and still couldn't get through.
The experience of stranded travelers caught in larger institutional failures has become a recurring theme, whether it involves tourists stranded after a cruise ship ran aground near Fiji or families separated from their luggage and their plans by systems that weren't stress-tested before going live.
Several open questions remain. Did any medical personnel respond to passengers who were vomiting and nearly fainting? Did Italian border authorities issue any statement about the delays? Was the figure of 100 stranded passengers confirmed by anyone other than the travelers themselves? And what, exactly, does easyJet consider adequate compensation for families forced to spend hundreds of pounds on emergency lodging and replacement flights because a government checkpoint couldn't process a queue?
The broader question is whether European authorities will fix the staffing and infrastructure gaps before the summer travel season, or whether travelers caught in bureaucratic chaos will simply become the new normal.
Governments love building new systems. They're less interested in making sure those systems actually work before they flip the switch, and they never seem to be the ones stuck in the queue.
