This summer, non-EU travelers heading to Europe will face a new bureaucratic stack. First, the Entry/Exit System (EES), which replaces the humble passport stamp with biometric registration, fingerprints and facial scans, at Schengen borders. Then, later in 2026, ETIAS kicks in: a pre-travel authorization, modeled on the US ESTA, that requires an online application and a €20 fee before you even board. Add tourist taxes now spreading from Venice to Bucharest, restrictions on short-term rentals compressing the supply of affordable accommodation, and Ryanair eliminating paper boarding passes. Each individual measure is defensible in isolation. Together, they form a thickening layer of procedural overhead that would have seemed exotic to a traveler from 2019.
The stated rationale is efficiency. Digital records replace paper stamps. Automated kiosks replace border guards. Pre-screening replaces queues. The problem is that the rollout is already falsifying the promise: Lisbon Airport effectively collapsed under the weight of EES processing in December 2025, with queues long enough to trigger emergency contingency discussions. France is behind on upgrading its e-gates to handle the new system reliably. The technology that was supposed to streamline entry is, at least for now, adding friction at every point it touches.
This is a near-perfect illustration of Jevons paradox. Jevons observed in 1865 that more efficient steam engines did not reduce coal consumption: they made coal-powered production cheaper, which expanded its use until total consumption exceeded the original baseline. The logic applies here, but the mechanism is institutional rather than economic. Biometrics now lower the administrative cost of designing and implementing new entry requirements. That lower cost removes a natural brake on regulatory ambition. EES and ETIAS do not replace the existing rulebook: they sit on top of it, while tourist taxes, rental restrictions, and carrier verification obligations accumulate alongside. The efficiency gain from digitization is immediately consumed by the expanded scope of what becomes administratively feasible to demand. Governments find it easier to add requirements, and we find it harder to travel.
Tech fetichism in the public sector follows a generational rythm, often with policy consequences. Biometrics were the flavor of the 2010s: replace unreliable paper documents with fingerprints and facial scans, and border security becomes both tighter and faster. The EES is that promise, now visibly struggling at Lisbon and Paris. AI is the solution of the 2020s, and governments are already reaching for it to help travelers navigate the very systems those same governments are building. That is the tell. When the administrative burden of a new digital requirement becomes large enough to require an AI tool to explain it, the requirement has become the problem. What tends to happen next is that the AI gets added to the stack alongside the requirement. Policymakers accumulate credibility twice, and vendors invoice twice: once for deploying the biometric system, once for deploying the AI assistant that helps you survive it. Each generation of technology hands them a new ribbon to cut, a new press release to issue, a new modernization narrative to inhabit. The life of those of us on the receiving end of policy gets measurably more annoying each time.
A note for those who, like myself, enter the EU by road: the chaos is already tangible. Long lines, double screening on the same crossing, rules inconsistently applied by officials who are themselves still being trained on a system mid-rollout. This matters beyond individual inconvenience. Much of the economy surrounding the EU, precisely the countries the bloc is actively courting through its enlargement agenda, runs on road transport of goods and people across these same borders. The Western Balkans move raw materials and finished products in and out of the single market by truck. Cross-border labor, seasonal workers, small traders: none of them fly through Terminal 2. The project of European integration and the operational reality of EES are colliding daily at border crossings that the policymakers designing these systems will never personally use. So much for good intentions when the borders it requires crossing are becoming, by design, harder to use. Most likely, the next AI solution to that problem is already being procured somewhere in Brussels.