alicante airport

Hi,

We were there at 9.30 last night to pick my brother up. He flew from Bournemouth on Ryanair and the only delay was getting off the plane as they only had one exit. Passport control no problem,  don't know about baggage as he only had hand luggage and he said they we only spot checking covid passports. Through in less than 20 mins.

Think it does vary though as a friend landed the night before at midnight and the queues were horrendous,  took her over an hour to get through. 

Hopefully you'll be lucky :-)

Hi Kevin,

I can't answer your query specifically, but I thought it would be helpful generally for anyone following your thread to add here some reports from yesterday's edition of The Local:

"Spain’s Interior Ministry has been willing to act relatively quickly to address the bottlenecks that are occurring [at main airports], with two measures which should lead to fewer holdups.  The ministry, headed by Fernando Grande-Marlaska, announced this week that it will deploy an extra 500 border guards at the country’s 12 busiest airports over the course of June 2022.  These are Alicante, Barcelona, Bilbao, Girona, Gran Canaria, Ibiza, Lanzarote, Madrid, Málaga, Mallorca, Menorca, Valencia, Fuerteventura, Sevilla and Tenerife Sur.  That takes the total number of police officers specialising in migration up 1,725 at these 12 airports with the highest volumes of air traffic, around 300 more than in 2019.  This should benefit all non-EU/Schengen travellers, from a workforce increase that’s been labelled as permanent and not just for the summer season. 

"Spain’s Interior Ministry has also confirmed that British citizens will be able to use the Automated Border Control eGates at the same airports where more border officials will be deployed (listed above).  In practice, this will mean that just like other EU/Schengen nationals, Britons will be able to scan their biometric passports as they could before Brexit came into force.  However, according to some reports they may still have to have their passports stamped at separate Brit-specific manned posts that have been created at some airports in Spain.  Fewer British tourists ‘clogging up’ non-EU passport controls should be beneficial to all third-country nationals, travel authorities have reasoned.  Spain therefore follows the example of Portugal, which introduced the measure in April, and has listened to the advice of Spain’s Airlines Association (ALA) whose president, Javier Gándara, recently pointed out “this will be the first summer with the requirement to check UK passports and the first period of normalised air traffic after the British Government eliminated all Covid restrictions”.

Kind regards,

Kim

I came in this morning.

The queues were short. No problems. Automated gates, then the passport stamped (although, having a TIE, mine wasn't stamped).

I happened to get picked, at random, for the Covid-pass check. Just a 1-second scan ... all good.