How could this affect UK holidaymakers?

According to a Freedom of Information (FOI) request performed by Economy Class and Beyond, in 2017/2018, almost 48 million passengers passed through ePassport gates at airports up and down the UK. We submitted another FOI request and discovered that this has now risen to 54.68 million for 2018/2019. This is only set to increase further with the addition of seven new countries (Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, USA) allowed to use these gates from May 2019 onwards.



Factoring in the sorts of delays we’ve uncovered, we can estimate the time it’s costing the UK when these gates fail. We can safely estimate that a failed check adds on one minute to holidaymakers time, and we’ve been told by Kevin Smith that approximately one percent of people fail these checks.

1% of 54.68m is 546,800 people

This equates to 546,800 minutes

Which is the same as 9,113 hours

That’s just under 380 days a year!

Who knew hipster beards could cause so much damage to our holidays? And with these seven new countries set to start using the 264 gates across the country, our queues may only get longer.