Lisbon airport departure to US 4/24
We are in the airport now waiting to board our flight to Chicago. Passport control line was wrapped all the way back through duty free but it moved quickly and we were through in 25-30 min. Security took 10-15 before that. I had heard they suspended the EES system again but it wasn’t clear so we got there almost 4 hours to be sure which was obviously way more than necessary. They funneled us to the EU lines so maybe that was an effort to speed the process. It’s all so unclear and poorly marked/communicated that it’s hard to predict what “system” they’ll be using on any given day, but we were lucky.
It was a disaster coming in on 4/13- half the biometric machines were broken, the ones that were on weren’t working consistently to grab photos and fingerprints and everyone (even for whom the machines were successful) still had to go through the same line to see a gate agent anyway.