EES Self-Service Kiosks: How to Skip the Manned Booth at Europe's Border

The difference between a fast EES crossing and a slow one often comes down to one choice: self-service kiosk or manned booth. Kiosks are the EU's answer to the queues — but only some travelers can use them, and they do not do everything. Here is how EES self-service kiosks work, who qualifies, and how to use them to move through the border faster.

What Self-Service Kiosks Do

EES self-service kiosks let eligible travelers complete much of their border registration themselves — the kiosk captures your facial photo, fingerprints and passport data without waiting for an officer to do each step manually. They exist specifically to relieve the queues caused by biometric enrolment, moving the routine cases through faster and leaving officers to handle exceptions. Where available, they are the single best way to speed up your crossing.

Who Can Use Them

The key requirement: a biometric (chip) passport. Kiosks read the chip, so a machine-readable biometric identity document is a prerequisite. If your passport has the biometric chip (most modern passports do) and the airport or crossing has kiosks installed, you can use them. If you hold a standard, non-chip passport, or the crossing has no kiosks, you use a manned booth for your first registration instead. The biometrics page covers what is captured either way.

What You Still Do at the Booth

Kiosks handle the data and biometric capture, but the process may still route you past an officer for final verification, especially on a first registration or if the system flags anything. Think of the kiosk as doing the heavy lifting — the enrolment — while an officer confirms and admits you. On repeat crossings within your three-year window, the kiosk experience is fastest of all, because it is simply verifying your stored face or fingerprints rather than enrolling you fresh.

Why Kiosks Matter for Queues

Given that EES wait times have reached two hours at peak periods, kiosks are the pressure valve. Every traveler who self-serves at a kiosk is one fewer in the manned-booth line. As more kiosks are installed across Schengen airports and crossings through 2026 and 2027, average waits should fall. For now, having a biometric passport and heading straight for the kiosks — rather than defaulting to the booth line — is a concrete way to save time.

Kiosks, the App, and Planning Ahead

Kiosks pair well with the Travel to Europe app where it is offered: pre-enter your data on the app, then use the kiosk for the biometric capture, and your border step is as short as EES allows. Combine that with an off-peak arrival and you are the traveler who walks through while others wait. For the full arrival walkthrough, see airport registration.