Jojo Moyes was stopped at Marseille airport in October and told she had overstayed in Europe because an earlier exit from Portugal had not been logged in the EU Entry/Exit System overstay errors case. She had only spent 23 days in Europe in the previous six months, but the system still treated her as if she had gone over the limit.
“The clock had been ticking ever since. Under Brexit rules, I was now an overstayer.” She also said: “The border control senior officer at Marseille warned me that I should not attempt to re-enter Europe until it is sorted out, or face a €10,000 fine and a two-year ban.”
Marseille airport and Portugal
The dispute began when a border control guard at Marseille airport examined Moyes’s travel record on her way home from a five-day trip to France. The system showed that her exit from Portugal on an earlier trip in May had not been correctly logged, and Moyes did not have passport stamps to prove it because stamping has mostly been replaced by Europe’s new electronic, biometric border checks called the Entry-Exit System.
That mismatch is the practical problem for travellers using the Schengen zone after Brexit. British passport holders are entitled to spend 90 in every 180 days in European Schengen zone countries like France, Portugal, Spain and Italy, but the EES record can make a traveller look like an overstayer if an exit is missing.
Which? and other travellers
Which? said dozens of its readers have contacted it with similar stories. One traveller said her elderly parents were “utterly terrified” after their exits via Bilbao airport were not recorded, while another said his journey through the Channel Tunnel from the UK to Calais had not been logged in the Entry-Exit System at Folkestone.
A different traveller said he was temporarily detained for two hours on the Serbian/Romanian border and asked to explain missing entry data from the Entry-Exit System. At Amsterdam Schiphol, an immigration officer told one traveller that rejection by the eGates was due to multiple EES accounts, with the explanation that officers “don’t know which account to query, so just reject the passport.”
Entry-Exit System rollout
The Entry-Exit System was officially rolled out on 10 April, and the rollout caused long queues and disruption at many airports this summer. Some travellers missed flights because of the wait times, while the EU allowed airports to suspend use of the Entry-Exit System if it created excessive queues.
Airports could use an older system to register entries and exits instead of the Entry-Exit System, and states were allowed to retroactively upload passport data while temporarily defaulting to passport stamping. That fallback matters for passengers like Moyes because a missing electronic exit can turn a routine border crossing into a false overstay warning.
After the October stop, Which? reached out to the European Commission about Moyes’s case. The unanswered issue now is how many travellers have had exits or entries mislogged and how many records still need correcting before the next border check puts another passenger in the same position.
