The European Commission has published its inaugural Visa Strategy alongside a five-year Asylum and Migration Management plan, promising to harmonise entry rules across the Schengen Area and complete the digitalisation of all short- and long-stay visa procedures by 2028. The blueprint, released on 14 February, specifically cites France, Germany, Spain and Italy as launch partners for new pilot platforms.
For Italy, the strategy dovetails with the Foreign Ministry’s ongoing migration of the Portale Visti database to a cloud environment and the October 2025 rollout of the biometric Entry/Exit System (EES) at Fiumicino and Malpensa. From the traveller’s perspective, Schengen passport stamps will disappear, replaced by electronic records that automatically enforce the 90/180-day rule.
![EU unveils first-ever Visa Strategy, pledging fully digital applications by 2028]()
The plan also re-confirms the end-2026 go-live date for ETIAS, the €7 travel authorisation that visa-exempt nationals—including Britons and Americans—must obtain before boarding flights to Italy. Business-travel providers should therefore begin integrating ETIAS prompts into booking flows and educating travellers about the tighter pre-departure screening.
Travellers and corporate mobility teams navigating these upcoming changes can streamline the process through VisaHQ’s dedicated Italy portal (https://www.visahq.com/italy/), which consolidates ETIAS guidance, digital visa requirements and real-time support into a single dashboard. The platform’s step-by-step tools help ensure forms are completed correctly and deadlines met, minimising the risk of last-minute travel disruptions as Italy phases in biometric and online-only procedures.
By centralising visa processing and embedding risk analysis upfront, Brussels hopes to shorten appointment queues, reduce fraud and make the bloc more attractive to skilled workers. Employers relocating talent to Milan’s life-science cluster or Rome’s aerospace sector can expect more predictable timelines—but also less room for error once biometric and security databases are cross-checked in real time.
For Italy, the strategy dovetails with the Foreign Ministry’s ongoing migration of the Portale Visti database to a cloud environment and the October 2025 rollout of the biometric Entry/Exit System (EES) at Fiumicino and Malpensa. From the traveller’s perspective, Schengen passport stamps will disappear, replaced by electronic records that automatically enforce the 90/180-day rule.
The plan also re-confirms the end-2026 go-live date for ETIAS, the €7 travel authorisation that visa-exempt nationals—including Britons and Americans—must obtain before boarding flights to Italy. Business-travel providers should therefore begin integrating ETIAS prompts into booking flows and educating travellers about the tighter pre-departure screening.
Travellers and corporate mobility teams navigating these upcoming changes can streamline the process through VisaHQ’s dedicated Italy portal (https://www.visahq.com/italy/), which consolidates ETIAS guidance, digital visa requirements and real-time support into a single dashboard. The platform’s step-by-step tools help ensure forms are completed correctly and deadlines met, minimising the risk of last-minute travel disruptions as Italy phases in biometric and online-only procedures.
By centralising visa processing and embedding risk analysis upfront, Brussels hopes to shorten appointment queues, reduce fraud and make the bloc more attractive to skilled workers. Employers relocating talent to Milan’s life-science cluster or Rome’s aerospace sector can expect more predictable timelines—but also less room for error once biometric and security databases are cross-checked in real time.
