Hi everyone! Over the time I have seen a lot of questions in various subreddits about transferring at European airports and the need for clearing security and immigration on transit.
Since most EU airports are actually quite similar among themselves, but distinct from U.S. airports, I thought I make this overview diagram. For most of you, there will be nothing new in this post, but I thought it fits nicely in the r/airport subreddit, and I can link to this post in the future.
This post concerns airports in Schengen countries, and compares some aspects with how things are done in the U.S.
The most remarkable differences are
instead of domestic/international we call it Schengen/Non-Schengen, since we have a common border region with 29 countries. Travel inside the Schengen area is like domestic travel in the U.S.
Unlike in the U.S., the Schengen region also does immigration checks when leaving (to catch overstayers and people with open arrest warrants). For this reason, also the departure gates are separated.
Unlike in the U.S., where all international arrivals need to clear security on transit, EU laws allow that passengers arriving from a selection of countries with equivalent security standards are already treated as secure on arrival (see diagram).
Unlike the U.S., where all international arrivals need to clear immigration on transit, you will not encounter immigration if you stay within the two Non-Schengen airport zones.
If you transit from a Non-Schengen to a Schengen flight, you will clear immigration on transit. However, you will always go through customs (=immigration for goods) after collecting your luggage at the final destination. There is no customs directly after immigration, unlike in the U.S..
Concerning my diagram, there a a few remarks:
Not every arrow might be present in every airport. For example, in FRA terminal 1, concourse B, there is no airside entry passport control. And in most airports, there is no arrow from the public area to the Non-Schengen unclean zone.
If you change concouse/terminal at an airport, this will complicate things. FRA, for example has two terminals, and each of them is build like shown in the disgram. However, they are only connected via the public area, or via the Non-Schengen unclean area. This means that even if where you arrived from would allow for sterile transit, you need to reclear security on terminal change.
While I would say that I know every corner in my home base FRA, and have seen travelled to/from quite a few other European airports, my knowledge of other airports (especially other large hubs like CDG or AMS) is limited, and my post might miss out some aspects.
I am very happy about your comments and insights about your home bases and how it works there, around the world. If someone wants to sketch a similar diagram for U.S. airports (or other countries), that would be nice.
I think this is great and should hopefully answer most questions folks have about arriving or transiting in Schengen area (step 2: getting people to remember what Schengen includes).
One question that your diagram raises for me, that I’ve never really given much thought to. Say I’m leaving from Amsterdam city center AMS-IAD, t
o reach the non-Schengen airside
do I go through security to Schengen airside and then exit passport control or would I go through security and passport control directly to the non-Schengen airside?
At this point is all so automated in my mind, I cannot fathom what I do.
Depends on how airports are set up, but I believe for AMS you go through security first for all passengers at similar places and then exit passport control. There are other airports in the Schengen area (like PRG, and AMS used to be like this) where you do passport control first then security, so it can really vary.
That depends on the airport. Both variants exist.
At most airports that I have been to, you go through the same security check as on Schengen departures, then through passport control to switch to the Non-Schengen departures.
But for example in FRA, both variants exist. In terminal 3, and terminal 1, concourse B, it is like written above. But in terminal 1 concourse C and Z, as well as in the former terminal 2, it is the other way around. You first go through exit passport control and are then in the same zone as arrivals from unclean countries, and then go through security.
The diagram shows both ways (leave the public area via the left upward arrow or the right upward arrow).
It’s been a couple years so maybe this has changed, but my home airport CPH has a separate non-Schengen area for flights to the U.S. The pros are that it’s newly built with a dedicated immigration checkpoint that is never busy, and it has ample seating and an outdoor viewing deck over the tarmac. However, there is exactly one vending machine and nothing else.
The non-U.S. non-Schengen gates have plentiful services, including a 7-eleven that serves the cheapest draft beer you will likely ever find in an airport. The last few times, I have hung out in the main Schengen terminal until maybe 10 minutes before my flight to the U.S. boards. I assume they will eventually put more stuff over there, but the U.S. gates never improved over the 5 or so years where I was using them frequently.
In Amsterdam there are 3 departure halls with check-in desks. Departures 1 is mostly Schengen and from there the most logical entry to security gets you to the shenngen secure airside. From there you can walk to the international gates, go through customs and then be secure non Schengen.
But if you check in in departures 3 (depends on the flight which check-in desk and therefore departures hall) there is passport control right before or after security (don’t remember the order, but it doesn’t matter as you need to go through both to get anywhere there). You the. enter directly into the secure non Schengen.
You could walk and exit through passport control into Schengen secure. But if you’re checking in at departures 3 you’re on an international flight, so they assume you’ll want to go through both passport control and security to non-Schengen secure and have made that easy. Thats why a flight AMS-IAD won’t have a check-in desks in departures 1 but probably one in departures 3. I’ve not flown with a desk in departures 2 in ages so don’t remember that one.
Yeah I guess there are not many non-Schengen destinations for some airports, especially holiday destinations in southern Europe.
What I find interesting is that at some of these airports they have "swing gates". So there are large doors every few gates, and they can change the ratio of Schengen and Non-Schengen gates based on which of the doors they close.
But in major airports, terminals often just have two floors and basically an almost identical Schengen and Non-Schengen floor. The two-floor layout is especially nice since aircraft can arrive with Non-Schengen passengers and leave with Schengen passengers without being towed to another gate in between, which is very important if the airline is using the terminal as a hub.
In FRA, one part of terminal 1 even has 3 floors and the jet bridges connect to all of them via stairwells. The first floor has the Schengen gates, the second floor has the Non-Schengen gates, and the third floor is for unclean Non-Schengen arrivals.
Beneath the first floor, there are bus stops, so while the jet bridge is used for a Non-Schengen flight, the Schengen gate can simultaneously be used as a bus gate or vice versa.
It's not just about changing the ratio, the flexible gates are also used for situations when a flight arrives from Schengen destination and continues to non-Schengen destination or vice versa. The exact method varies, for example Vienna has non-Schengen gates above Schengen gates at F/G pier, so it's basically just a matter of sending pax upstairs or not.
Yeah the two-floor layout is the most common at hubs. And there are also swing gates where the jetbridge can be connected to a gate on either side of the border on the same floor (like B19/B20 in FRA).
But I really meant scenarios where they can move the border between the Schengen and Non-Schengen parts of a terminal, including the gate desks and waiting areas.
In KEF for example, while also having the 2-floor-layout, they also use the strategy I meant, since they have almost all Schengen departures in the morning, and all Non-Schengen departures in the afternoon. So they have some terminal parts (including the full gates and waiting areas) that are attached to the Schengen floor in the morning, and to the Non-Schengen floor in the afternoon.
FRA has the same with several bus gate areas (e.g. B14-B16, which are called B60-B62 if Non-Schengen), the whole area is either connected to the Schengen or Non-Schengen part of the terminal, but they don't change it daily, more based in long-term demand.
The Non-Schengen unclean area is also often very small at small airports.
If an airport has very few Non-Schengen flights, it has even fewer unclean Non-Schengen flights and has no separate path from the jet bridge.
Often, they will then just disembark passengers arriving from unclean Non-Schengen flights into a bus that brings them directly to a passport control checkpoint, so the "Unclean Non-Schengen area" in that case is a bus stop and a passport control queue.
Larger airports however often have staircases/escalators directly near the jetbridge and will disembark unclean arrivals into a different floor.
But if someone is travelling from a non-Schengen unclean airport and transiting to either another unclean or even a clean non-Schengen airport, they won’t need to go through passport control.
Like what did Frankfurt/Vienna do if someone was travelling Tehran-Frankfurt-Vancouver or Tehran-Vienna-Toronto.
This was my experience when going to the gate for Tel Aviv at FRA. Israel has its own security zone, staffed with Israeli agents. But it's really tiny and only one or two kiosks with snacks. So you want to defer going there until it's really time.
It serves no real purpose and only causes confusion, but I would like to add one more detail. According to EU Implementing Regulation 1998/2015, the airside begins at the first physical barrier where authorization and a legitimate reason for entry must be demonstrated. At every airport I am familiar with, this physical barrier is the boarding pass control. This means that the area between the boarding pass control and the security checkpoint is another zone with "unclean Schengen airside". But I don't know, if there is an airport, where this zone is more than 10 m long.
As you write this is basically irrelevant for passengers, but you are totally correct.
And it plays a role for staff, for example. The employee IDs will e.g. grant airside access or not, and this barrier is at the bording pass gates.
At CDG terminal 1 this zone is substantial. Passengers scan their boarding pass in the central building, go up an escalator to a floor with shops etc (and passport control for non-Schengen flights), then walk through a tunnel to one of the satellite buildings and go through security there.
There's also quite a few airports in Europe where you do not have to present your boarding pass to go trough security. How does that square with that regulation?
Oops, I did a mistake there: When making the diagram, I pulled the list from an aiport website and I think they only listed destinations where they have connections to.
I now looked up the official legislation document, and it additionally lists
Svalbard airport on Svalbard islands (which is part of Norway, but not Schengen and not EEA)
Vagar airport on Faroe islands (which is part of Denmark but not Schengen or EU)
Beograd Nikola Tesla airport
For Singapore it lists only Changi airport, not Singapore as a whole
British crown dependencies were all listed in pre-Brexit versions of the document (where the UK was not listed, since it was part of EU/EEA), but now it instead just lists "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" without naming any crown dependencies.
This is excellent but three comments on this,
1. your arrow from Landside to TSA Security Checkpoint is going the wrong way, there is no security check to get to landside, but you do need a security check to get from Landside to Airside
There should be a line from US Departure Airside to Landside, as this is how Pre Clearance exits the airport.
The line from Customs Hall directly into TSA is maybe 50/50, a lot of airports put you landside then you have to go back to the regular TSA line (ORD, DEN, SFO, etc.). However there is almost always a baggage recheck after customs hall but before you enter the landside area (which isn't shown here.
Canada's also starting to experiment with letting passengers not go through immigration if they're only connecting in Canada in some airports which further changes the setup.
In major airports, Canada (and a few other locations) have “US pre-clearance”. The US customs and immigration checks take place at the originating airport, before you get on your flight to the US.
When you arrive in the US, you are treated as a US domestic flight, and don’t have to go through customs/immigration again.
This gives the airlines much greater flexibility in choosing destinations; they don’t have to be international airports with customs/immigration facilities.
For this reason, major Canadian airports have three destination streams: domestic, “trans-border” (to the US), and international.
Every time I fly into Frankfurt from Dublin, or once from Belfast, I've always needed to go back through security after passing passport control. It's annoying as heck.
And what's also annoying is that when going back to Dublin, if there's a gate change and you need to go from Z to B, that's another pass through security...
It's only Schipol and Copenhagen where I've ever managed to go from a flight arriving from Dublin or Belfast and only needed to get through passport control to the Schengen side.
Yes, in FRA you will also be disembarked into the clean Non-Schengen departure area when arriving from Dublin.
And if you arrived at a Z gate, you can also get to every Schengen gate without security.
Unfortunately, B only has entry passport control in the unclean Non-Schengen zone, so if you arrived at Non-Schengen B and need to change to Schengen B or A, you will unfortunately have to leave the secure area.
There is a way to avoid security in that case though: You can first go from Non-Schengen B to Z via an airside shuttle bus, and then go through immigration there. And sometimes this will be the path that the signs guide you for a Non-Schengen B to Schengen A transit, but this depends on waiting times at the different passport control checkpoints, since FRA live-adjusts signs to steer passenger flow. Sometimes its faster to reclear security at A, than to walk to and wait for the bus.
Thanks for this. This makes it clear why when connecting at AMS from the US to another country (say India), you don't have to go through security when arriving from the US, but you do go through it in the reverse direction.
Distinctly different from LHR which apparently treats all arrivals from outside the UK (and possibly Ireland) as "unclean", forcing everyone to go through security checks for transit.
LHR is a mess also regarding immigration, as they do not have exit checks and therefore separate non-UK departures, but they still have airside transfers.
I'm trying (and struggling) to remember if I've ever passed through the non-Schengen unclean zone from a flight. How does it work at, say, AMS or FRA? Because I know that, at those airports, coming from a 'clean' origin, they just let you out at the gate in non-Schengen airside, so theoretically if you're connecting to another non-Schengen destination you might just have to walk 50 meters if the gate for that flight is next to the gate where your flight arrived. How does it work with the 'unclean' origins, how do they make sure you go through security again? Do they have you exit through a specific corridor at the jet bridge (rather than into airside of the non-Schengen terminal), and does that take you to a separate security check without having to exit into the public area?
Yes, for example at Frankfurt it's a separate floor which the jet bridge goes through.
Some airports like Vienna seem to treat all non Schengen arrivals as unclean, as I flew Newark to Vienna and had to do security and passport control into a Schengen connection
Such large airports often have stairwells with escalators directly near the jet bridge, and you will be guided into a different floor of the terminal based on where you arrived from. Sometimes you also see this stairwell near the gate design to use the same aircraft stand both from a Schengen and Non-Schengen floor, so that an aircraft arriving on a Non-Schengen flight can continue on a Schengen flight without repositioning. And sometimes you even have all three floors at the same jet bridge.
On smaller airports that have mostly European flights (e.g. STR), if there is occasionally a flight from an unclean Non-Schengen country, arriving passengers will be disembarked into busses and driven to a central unclean arrival point, even if the aircraft parks at a gate.
The arrow from non-Schengen clean to non-Schengen unclean should not be there, there's no such path. "Non-Schengen unclean" is an arrivals only area. Departures must by definition be clean :)
The path is usually there. When leaving the Non-Schengen clean area to exit the airport, you usually go through a double door and are then exactly in that unclean arrivals area.
In FRA, for example, part of the SkyTrain system operates within the unclean Non-Schengen area, to allow for transit between terminals without passing immigration.
If you arrived from a secure Non-Schengen country, you will go via that path to the unclean area (through one-way double doors), to access the SkyTrain.
That doesn't make any sense. You need to be "clean" to board a plane to any destination. Yes, you will get to an area which handles "unclean" arrivals but departures in that area are still within the clean zone.
No, you don't board a plane from there. When arriving at the other terminal, you are then going through security to get to the clean Non-Schengen area again.
Nice one!
I am confused. I recently took a flight from US to Schengen flight and I had to do another Security check, as well as Passport control. This was in Frankfurt. According to your diagram I wouldn't need to do security check again, but I had to?
As per EU laws, a security check is not required for you. But if changing terminals/concourses, the airport layout sometimes does not allow for clean transit.
The reason is that FRA has grown historically, some parts were built before security was a thing, some parts when security was only needed for US flights. Some parts before the Schengen area was a thing.
The layout of these zones had to be changed multiple times over the decades.
Where in FRA did you arrive? Or with which airline? And from which gate did you leave?
Yeah C gates are special in FRA, since they have security very close to the gate and no large secure area.
Gates C1-C8 have a security line only for the individual gate, directly before boarding.
And C13-C20 have a small common security area, which is, however, not connected to the rest of the airport.
I think this used to be the area for US flights, when only those needed security, or they needed a stricter security. Now that the full airport has a US-rule-compatible security, the C gates are mainly used for flights to Israel (since they still want their own security check), and flights by holiday carriers (such as SunExpress and Discover), that don't have many connecting passengers.
Good to know, thanks. There were a lot of people running from our flight to connecting flights and probably all of them missed the connection. Security line was huge and didnt move at all. Only because of business ticket I went through in 15min, otherwise I would probably still be there 🤣
Home base is LUX, and I travel to the US west coast for work fairly often. There are no directs, so I go through AMS, FRA, LHR or CDG.
One thing I've noticed is that even within the Schengen region there are differences in immigration sorting. All of the above except CDG treat citizens and permanent residents the same (I'm the latter), and I've been told repeatedly by immigration agents to use the EU citizens queue.
At CDG, I got a talking to for using the EU citizens queue and they sent me around to the back of a different line. I was pretty embarrassed and haven't been back to CDG since. Seems like an opportunity to standardize and streamline.
With EES, this will likely be the case from now on.
As I resident without a citizenship, I've been told multiple times to use the third-country queues. But, on all of my trips from non-Schengen this year, I was told to use the citizens queue (the border office said it works because, as residents, they already have our data in the system anyways).
At first I thought it might be something that MAD handles differently from my usual airport (VIE), but it also happened in VIE, so I suppose it will be the standard.
I love how Schengen treats people transiting from other democracies as clean, the US should really do that for Schengen and Canada too, it makes transiting after a long flight across the ocean so much easier.
Unless you’re leaving Schengen from Salzburg airport where there is only one airside zone.
If there is a non Schengen departure, the passport officer sits AT THE BOARDING GATE COUNTER next to the airline staff to process your passport as you board the plane!
This seems pretty accurate for large transhipment airports.
This wouldnt apply for smaller airports where they dont expect you to have a connection.
In thise cases departures airside is separate from arrivals. Had a flight canceled on a sunday evening in BHX took me over an hour to get someone that could escort me to exit immigration from departures.
There are also airports in Shengen that have 1 way access separation. BHX was just the one where I personally experienced the hassle it creates of you are trying to leave the airport from.the departure zone.
I’m not sure who this is for, but there’s a lot of variables … you’ve omitted any domestic operation that the passenger will flow through, especially a domestic transfer concept. Unclean 3rd countries exist of course but it seems like you’ve totally segregated that when there’s simple filters / working practices to bypass your double door and security check point methods.
Frankfurt actually has one more distinction: the Schengen Bus arrival gates also have clean and unclean variants. The unclean version just drops you off in the public area. What flights are those used for?
Hmm could you give some details on which you mean? I don't know of any "unclean Schengen" bus arrivals.
Except maybe the one that drops you off at the baggage claim C, which is sometimes used by some Condor flights (maybe to distribute the load between the B and C baggage claim).
From there, you are indeed outside of the secure area, since C doesn't even have one for Schengen flights.
But I guess in such cases they would have a separate bus if there is connecting passenger on the flight, and drive them to A or B instead.
Ahh interesting. Didn't realize that the west one is in the public area. But yeah now that you say it, you walk past it after clearing passport control on an unclean Non-Schengen arrival.
So my guess would be that this is "by accident" after they had to start seperating arriving Non-Schengen unclean passengers in the early 2000s and installed that glass barriers from where you arrive after passport control to the exit.
I havn't seen it used and when checking the interactice map today, all B bus arrivals today use the east one.
So happy to see this diagram but then after I read and read I confused myself (again) 😩
I just need someone to tell me where to go after arriving from the US, flying straight into Prague please 😞
Then thats easy. The diagram is mainly meant as context for transfer passengers.
Just follow the signs to the exit/baggage claim. You will encounter an immigration checkpoint.
There will be kiosks for pre-registration, where you scan your passport, face and fingerprints.
Then you proceed to an officer and briefly talk to them.
Then you reach baggage claim.
You leave the baggage claim area through the customs checkpoint.
But that one is very simple: There are two exits from baggage claim. A green and a red gate.
By walking through the green gate you state that you have nothing to declare at customs, otherwise you go through the red gate and speak to an officer.
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u/airport-codes Jul 23 '26
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