Airport Council International (ACI) Europe has issued an open letter urging the European Commission and Schengen states—including Belgium—to ‘urgently stabilise’ the new digital Entry/Exit System (EES) after airport processing times ballooned by as much as 70 per cent since the system went live on 12 October. Peak queues of three hours have been reported in France, Germany and Spain, and while Brussels Airport has largely avoided headline-grabbing scenes thanks to 36 newly installed e-gates and 61 self-service kiosks, border police admit that kiosk outages and the still-missing smartphone pre-registration app are already confusing non-EU travellers.
From 9 January 2026 the EU plans to raise the mandatory biometric-registration threshold from 10 per cent to 35 per cent of third-country arrivals—a step ACI says is ‘untenable’ without urgent software fixes and flexible staffing rules. Belgium’s Interior Ministry will attend an extraordinary Schengen coordination meeting on 8 January to push for phased thresholds and an exemption for short-haul transit passengers, who risk missing their onward connections in Brussels.
For corporate mobility programmes the advice is clear: build an extra hour into itineraries, schedule arrivals in the early morning when queues dip, and brief executives to carry printed evidence of onward accommodation and meeting schedules in case of manual checks. Missed connections could trigger EU 261 compensation claims, so travel managers should pre-authorise alternative flights and consider premium-lane passes for critical staff.
![Belgium Braces for Entry/Exit System Queues as ACI Europe Demands Fixes]()
At this juncture, many travel teams are turning to specialist providers for up-to-date border intelligence. VisaHQ, for example, aggregates the latest EES and ETIAS requirements for Belgium and the wider Schengen zone, and can arrange expedited visa and passport services through a single dashboard—see https://www.visahq.com/belgium/ for details. Engaging such support helps companies keep pace with the rule changes without overwhelming internal travel desks.
Industry consultants note that kiosk literacy is emerging as a soft skill for frequent travellers, and some employers are running lunch-and-learn sessions to rehearse the fingerprint-and-facial-capture process. Longer-term, the EES infrastructure paves the way for ETIAS—the EU’s new travel authorisation—now delayed until late 2026. Savvy organisations are therefore baking EES checkpoints into travel policies and budgeting for periodic refresher training as the system evolves.
Belgium meanwhile continues to market its readiness: Brussels Airport says it can reallocate security screeners to man border booths at short notice, and is lobbying to let trusted-traveller nationals of certain third countries use e-gates to smooth flows. Whether that will be enough when passenger volumes rebound in the spring remains the open question ACI wants answered.
From 9 January 2026 the EU plans to raise the mandatory biometric-registration threshold from 10 per cent to 35 per cent of third-country arrivals—a step ACI says is ‘untenable’ without urgent software fixes and flexible staffing rules. Belgium’s Interior Ministry will attend an extraordinary Schengen coordination meeting on 8 January to push for phased thresholds and an exemption for short-haul transit passengers, who risk missing their onward connections in Brussels.
For corporate mobility programmes the advice is clear: build an extra hour into itineraries, schedule arrivals in the early morning when queues dip, and brief executives to carry printed evidence of onward accommodation and meeting schedules in case of manual checks. Missed connections could trigger EU 261 compensation claims, so travel managers should pre-authorise alternative flights and consider premium-lane passes for critical staff.
At this juncture, many travel teams are turning to specialist providers for up-to-date border intelligence. VisaHQ, for example, aggregates the latest EES and ETIAS requirements for Belgium and the wider Schengen zone, and can arrange expedited visa and passport services through a single dashboard—see https://www.visahq.com/belgium/ for details. Engaging such support helps companies keep pace with the rule changes without overwhelming internal travel desks.
Industry consultants note that kiosk literacy is emerging as a soft skill for frequent travellers, and some employers are running lunch-and-learn sessions to rehearse the fingerprint-and-facial-capture process. Longer-term, the EES infrastructure paves the way for ETIAS—the EU’s new travel authorisation—now delayed until late 2026. Savvy organisations are therefore baking EES checkpoints into travel policies and budgeting for periodic refresher training as the system evolves.
Belgium meanwhile continues to market its readiness: Brussels Airport says it can reallocate security screeners to man border booths at short notice, and is lobbying to let trusted-traveller nationals of certain third countries use e-gates to smooth flows. Whether that will be enough when passenger volumes rebound in the spring remains the open question ACI wants answered.
