Getting pretty eager to hear of your adventures in Spain! Obviously, they included some jamon. 
We are past the half way point. Having a great time. Made it to a couple of your suggestions so far, a couple didn’t work out, two were closed (Solla, D’Berto), but we’ve had some excellent meals and wine! In Santander now, have San Sebastián to go. I’ll write up a travelogue when I get home and add it to my original thread. Spain is terrific!
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Just transferred at CdG. Kiosks were cordoned off and the check was manual. Not busy arrival time here at 7.30 PM so we passed in 2 minutes.
Also transferred at CDG around 8am. Easy peasey.
Just got back from Portugal. Cleared in Lisbon with a connection to Madeira. The EES in Lisbon was a nightmare. Hours long lines, malfunctioning machines, little or no help from the airport personnel. How has the implementation gone in other European countries?
I love Portugal but that’s the last place you’ll want to break in a new system. LOL
A few years back I flew from Portugal to Germany on a brand new passport.
I get to Germany and customs ask “are you military or a diplomat?”. Uh, no. Why?
“Your passport doesn’t have a stamp on it” uh, okay. Here’s my boarding pass from the plane over there I just got off from Portugal
30 minutes later and 5 serious German offials later they figure out Portugal was planning on switch to an invisible passport stamp that requires a blacklight and for some reason they stamped mine with it. LOL
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Separate thread on this exists.
@moderators Can you merge these two, please?
We are flying in to Barcelona in 11 days. Hoping for a smooth entry
I first hope for a smooth landing lol
Flew home out of Madrid yesterday, through Charlotte to SFO. I know it’s the reverse of this thread, but some observations anyway: Getting out of Madrid was easy, fairly short security lines (though we had “priority”; I don’t think it was a lot different than the regular line from what I could see). A slight bit of hassle getting my wine checked at American Airlines, they needed a supervisor, but eventually it went through. Though somewhere along the way some inspector stole the corkscrew I had packed in with the wine! Strange.
My bigger complaint was arrival in Charlotte. They are implementing the same system Madrid has, with passport scan, photo ID, etc. Another big plane arrived with ours, so the lines were pretty long, and there were only two kiosks working, one part time. Took us probably half an hour to get through. Then customs pulled me aside to Xray our bags, with a wine suitcase and two stryo 6-packs. I don’t think they had any problem with the wine (I declared, the guy thought for a minute, then said have a nice day). My guess is they were looking for contraband food items.
Worst part was having to go through security again for our domestic flight. My first time dealing with this since the TSA issues. Lines were pretty ridiculous, though not hours long. Wife has had TAS pre-check for along time, so she was able to go through that very short line while I was stuck in the long regular line. Off to sign up for pre-check lol.
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Sign up for Global Entry. I think it is only a $20 premium but you probably need to do an interview.
Many premium cards (Amex Platinum, CSR), and select midtier cards (such as United and IHG) give Global Entry credits. If you don’t have any, you could get a signup bonus and the global entry fee will cover the annual fee on a midtier card. Global Entry gives you TSA precheck and it’s become easier to renew.
If your wife has a Chase credit card as primary user, she can refer you and get a referral bonus and you get a signup bonus. (or I could refer you). Feel free to PM if you want any thoughts on which cards are better for your travel patterns.
I mostly use a Citi card attached to Costco. She uses a Chase card attached to Southwest, because she has, up until now, done a lot of flying back and forth to San Diego, uses miles to fly our daughter either here or to San Diego, but that the San Diego connection will end this year. I also have a Citi card attached to AA, which I have had for years, but don’t use as much now. I have perused the Points thread from time to time, but have never really gotten into trying to play that game.
What about Mobile Passport? I used to use that some years ago, and think I saw an MP line, but these days it seems obsolete. I didn’t even scan or show my passport for U.S. entry, it was all off the photo. I miss collecting passport stamps lol.
If the time involved in getting a new card is worth more to you than the Global Entry fee, than just pay the fee. If not, then you can get some free nights or flights on top of Global Entry.
Mobil Passport, when it’s working, seems good but I don’t think it gives you precheck , which is what you need for domestic flights.
Global Entry was working for most of the TSA shutdown, not sure about Mobile Entry.
I don’t think we travel, or spend enough to justify a higher end card, but I’m a complete neophyte. The Spain trip we just took was probably a $15k spend, air, hotels, meals, misc. Last time we did that was 2017, though we are intent on traveling internationally more often, maybe 1-2 times per year. What would be a good card for us?
Responding via PM since there are more questions before I recommend one.
I didn’t realize it started before this summer, or that some entry points had already rolled them out. Our CDG arrival in March was using it. The line wasn’t terrible, but also not insignificant. Caught me by surprise to have to do all the fingerprinting and photo stuff. Fingerprint scanners were glitchy in terms of using them correctly. Took a few tries for me. Nothing crazy, but it was chaotic. Arrival time for us was about 8:00 a.m.
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It’s obviously not operator error, every person I saw using a new style kiosk had to scan their passport more than once, and repeat the fingerprinting 2 or 3 times. I was pretty careful, lined up my passport, and made sure my fingertips were well within the glass area. Cant remember if I had to repeat one or both, but it probably took 30-40 seconds for the process. I would say for a system like that to work, with large crowds of people, multiple languages, questionable competence, it better be bulletproof.
I flew into Frankfurt two weeks ago and had zero problems. One thing to note if you fly Delta, Delta gates will be moving to a new terminal and everything in the area has already closed including the Japanese restaurant.
I flew into Zurich last week and it was a mess. The passport scan machine appeared not to work and there were two separate entrances to get in lines to go through customs we chose the longer one and after an hour wait we were told we did not need to stand in that line because the machine had captured our information and we should have used the shorter line.