The video shows a long line of holidaymakers waiting for passport control at the tourist destination with the caption: ‘Gran Canaria was the worst entry into a country I have ever experienced’
A post on social media showing long lines to get into a popular Canary Islands holiday destination has warned Brits of “horrendous” waits for air passengers keen to get into the country and start their holidays.
The travel content creator @englandandtravel posted the clip, titled “Gran Canaria airport was horrendous on the way there, not only Birmingham with issues” on their TikTok account showing huge queues at the airport waiting to get into the holiday hotspot.
The video shows a long static line of holidaymakers waiting at the passport control checkpoint on the Canary Islands tourist destination with the caption: “Gran Canaria was the worst entry into a country I have ever experienced. I’m at Gran Canaria airport and I’ve got to be honest, this is the worst passport control I’ve ever seen in my life,” the travel blogger said in the clip.
“What’s happening is, there’s two queues, its absolute chaos, there’s no option where you just go through, show them your passport and they just say ‘yeah go through’. It’s got to go through some scanner, it is so slow, genuinely on average one person is processed every 10 minutes. I’ve been here an hour and I haven’t even moved. It’s not just me moaning, everybody in the queue – seasoned veterans who come here all the time have said they’ve never seen anything like this. Absolutely ridiculous.”
The travel creator, who has visited 47 countries and posts updates about food, travel and life in the UK to their Tiktok, drew hundreds of comments on the clip, posted in June.
Commenters reported a wide variety of experiences at the airport, user @stuwiiee described a similar nightmare, saying: “Came on the 5th July, all family with young children had to queue up to be checked by one guy. We were fairly ahead of the queue and it took nearly 2 hours. Was a similar situation leaving the country.”
Meanwhile other commenters said they had had no problems at all getting through when they had visited the country. Another user @tulketh however agreed with the experience shown in the clip, saying: “Same last year when I went lol . They gave up in the end and let people past lol”. The original poster @englandandtravel replied saying: “They did speed up but crazy for over an hour.”
While many in the comments tried to blame Brexit for the situation, meaning that UK citizens had to use a different passport control process to enter the Spanish holiday destination than EU citizens, others pointed out that this was a one-off and the years following the 2020 Brexit decision had not seen such bad queues.
In replies to other comments, the original poster @englandandtravel confirmed that the passport control systems had seemed to be working, but staff were just “on a go-slow” at the time.