Paris’s two main airports are making plans to handle larger-than-usual crowds in 2024, especially with the summer Olympics coming to Paris; the key piece of the plan is to move passengers through the airports more quickly by cutting border queues.
The plans announced earlier this week include hiring 225 new border agents by this June and another 500 next year for Paris, with a total of 1,200 nationally as one aspect of the plan.
The other big shift is electronic, with Paris airports increasing the number of automated passport gates, where passengers scan passports and are verified by photo recognition, saving long waits for a line with a border agent. There are presently 122; by a year from now there will be 170.
The gates will also be reprogrammed to make them more flexible. At present, most are used for arrivals with EU and Schengen passports; others are directed to the manned lanes even though their passports are compatible with the electronic gates. Airport officials say that the new programming will allow them to switch any particular gate to handle ‘third country’ passports in minutes, rather than requiring an overnight program change, so they will be able to assign enough gates to each group to keep traffic moving.
