Greece is taking a unilateral approach to new EU-wide rules on British visitors, dropping the bloc’s Entry Exit System (EES) checks on arrivals, according to tourism officials in the Hellenic Republic.
The news came from an online statement on the Embassy of Greece in London, which said: “We would like to inform you that within the framework of the implementation of the new ESS as of 10 April 2026, British passport holders are excluded from biometric registration at Greek border crossing points.”
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Greek authorities have indicated they will not collect fingerprints or photos for UK travellers as part of the EU’s new border checks.
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It was confirmed by Eleni Skarveli, the UK director of the Greek National Tourism Organisation on 17 April, just one week after the formal rollout of the EES across the Schengen area. Greece would exempt British passport holders from biometric registration to ensure “a smoother and more efficient arrival experience,” she said.
Since voting to leave the European Union in the so-called Brexit referendum in 2016, British passport holders have become third-country nationals in the eyes of the bloc. Since 10 April 2026, when arriving at European border checkpoints, all third-country nationals, including Brits, are supposed to register their facial image, fingerprint, passport details, and duration of stay under Entry Exit System requirements. The information is then stored and can be accessed quickly for future visits, to better enable visitor tracking and streamline security processes.
Though some countries have managed to implement EES without too much disruption, others have seen long queues develop at arrival and departure hubs. The UK’s Port of Dover has put separate EES lanes into place for passengers boarding ferries. There, and at Folkestone and London St Pancras, the Eurostar train terminal, EES kiosks are reportedly not properly linked up to EU or French police systems. At Umberto Delgado Airport in Lisbon, Portugal, has seen the national guard brought in due to excess wait times and disruption, while in Milan over 100 passengers were left behind in security queues by an EasyJet flight to Manchester.
Amid this uncertainty, and after an acknowledgement from EU commissioners that EES implementation hiccups would mean that mitigations remain in effect in some places beyond the 10 April deadline, Greece is taking a different approach to the success of its summer 2026 season—abandoning the biometric registration process for British arrivals altogether.
Why this benefit for Brits and not, say US arrivals? The answer is that Britain is second only to Germany when it comes to source markets for the Greek tourism sector. The UK sent 4.89 million holidaymakers to Greece in 2025, a year-on-year uptick of 7.6%. They spent a whopping €3.74 billion, an increase of 18.5% on 2024. Simon Calder, writing in The Independent estimates that some Greek border points handle up to 2,000 UK arrivals per day in peak season.
Greece has not always had a smooth relationship with the EU, once threatening to leave and tread its own “Grexit” path. As it hopes to welcome a record-breaking stream of UK visitors again this summer, and remains so economically reliant on them then, its solo decision to relax the EU’s EES requirements is hardnosed, though not entirely a surprise.
For older or less digitally-confident travellers, not having to complete EES steps could make all the difference to them choosing Greece as a destination over its rivals. What’s more, letting British arrivals through with no EES registration “is expected to significantly reduce waiting times and ease congestion at airports,” Skarveli said—funnelling those high-spending visitors out of security queues and into hotels, shops, and restaurants where they can begin to splash their holiday cash.
