Europe’s New Border System Says Some Travelers Never Left

The EU’s digital Entry/Exit System was supposed to replace passport stamps with clean, automatic records. For a growing number of British travelers it is doing the opposite, logging them in but never logging them out. The most prominent case is novelist Jojo Moyes, author of Me Before You, who was stopped at Marseille airport in October on her way home from a five-day trip and told she had overstayed. By her count she had spent 23 days in the Schengen area in the previous six months, far below the 90-in-180-day limit.

The problem traced back to May, when her exit from Portugal was never recorded in EES, so the system kept counting her days. A senior French border officer warned her not to return until the record was fixed, or risk a €10,000 fine and a two-year ban. After two weeks of little progress she hired an immigration lawyer. Which? has gathered similar cases: elderly parents whose exits through Bilbao went unrecorded, a traveler held for two hours on the Serbia–Romania border over an unlogged Channel Tunnel entry, and another rejected by Schiphol’s eGates for having multiple EES accounts.

Part of the cause appears to be the summer’s long queues. EES became fully operational on April 10, 2026, and the EU allowed border posts to suspend checks when lines got too long. When the old and new systems fail to sync, a record can end up with an entry and no exit. Correcting it is slow. Portugal’s data controller asked Moyes for a lawyer-certified passport copy and proof of exit even after she supplied a Portuguese police email confirming she left, and France had not replied weeks later.

If you travel to Europe on a non-EU passport, a few habits now matter. Check your status with the EU’s Check How Long You Can Stay tool, which only counts stays from April 10, 2026. Keep boarding passes and ferry or Eurotunnel tickets as proof of exit. If a record is wrong, write to the data controller of the country you last visited with a passport scan, proof of exit and a clear request for correction; for French records that is the Interior Ministry, with the data regulator CNIL as the escalation route.

Sources: Which?, Connexion France