Brits arriving and leaving Malaga Airport have reported chaotic scenes at passport control.
Fuming passengers took to social media to report waiting up to two hours or even longer to get through on either end.
Sheelagh Foy wrote in an expat forum on Facebook: ‘If you are traveling from Malaga airport today, the queue for UK passport holders to get through passport control was 1hr 15mins… for EU passport holders 1 hour!’
Another Brit commented on the post: ‘My parents were flying to UK, I dropped them off at 9.15am, the flight was 11.20am and they just got through passport control.
‘They had to hold the flight as so many hadn’t made it through.’
‘It’s horrendous,’ another traveller warned, ‘go straight to the departure gate.’
By around 1pm, the queues are believed to have subsided.
It comes as Malaga has begun trialling the EU’s new EES passport system.
The Entry/Exit System (EES) is an automated border control procedure involving facial recognition, fingerprint scans and digital data collection.
It entered its test phase at Malaga Airport on October 20.
The system is being tested one hour per day to fine-tune the technology. A full rollout is scheduled by April 10, 2026, with authorities allowed 180 days to fully implement it across Spain’s border checkpoints.
Once live, the system will replace the manual stamping of passports with a digital record of every non-EU traveller’s photo, fingerprints, passport scan and entry or exit timestamp.
If a traveller is denied entry, that too will be logged.
The Ministry of the Interior has invested €83 million to upgrade Spain’s border infrastructure, including airports, ports, and land crossings, with the new technology.
For now, biometric collection will be phased in slowly, and traditional passport stamping will continue alongside EES during the transition period.
The group most affected in Malaga is, unsurprisingly, British nationals, who made up 2.83 million arrivals in 2024, accounting for over 5.7 million total movements.
