If ETIAS has been sitting at the back of your mind as one more thing to sort before your next Disneyland Paris trip, you can put it down. The European Union has delayed it again, and this time there is no new date to replace the old one.
It was due at the end of this year, then it slipped to 2027, and now the target has gone altogether. The official line is that ETIAS is not in operation and no applications are being collected. The EU has promised several months of notice before it goes live, so nobody is going to be blindsided at the airport.
What's holding it up is the border system that arrived first. EES, the biometric entry and exit system, went live across Schengen in April, and it has made for a long summer of queues while everyone gets used to fingerprints and face scans instead of a passport stamp. ETIAS was always designed to follow EES rather than sit alongside it, and the agency building it has now accepted that this year isn't realistic. There are still technical problems to sort.
So here's the bit worth telling anyone you're travelling with. Don't apply, and don't pay anyone offering to apply on your behalf. There is nothing to apply for. Because the launch has been announced and pulled so many times, there are sites perfectly happy to take your money for a document that doesn't exist, and ABTA has warned that anyone trying to apply now risks losing money and personal data along with it.
For now you travel to Paris exactly as you do today, with a valid passport and the EES process at the border.
