Etias, the EU’s electronic travel authorisation for visa-exempt visitors including Britons, isn’t open for applications. It has no confirmed launch date. None of that has stopped more than 150 websites from charging UK travellers to apply for it, which is why the travel association Abta issued a blunt piece of advice this week: don’t.

A Waiver That Keeps Not Launching

Etias was designed to do something straightforward: before a UK, US, Australian or Canadian visitor enters the Schengen zone, they’d pay €20, answer a security questionnaire online, and receive clearance valid for up to three years. It has been “about to launch” for years, tied to the EU’s parallel Entry/Exit System, which has itself been repeatedly delayed by software problems at border crossings, including French entry points.

This year’s target date quietly disappeared from official EU pages in July. Abta’s director of public affairs, Luke Petherbridge, put it plainly: “While Etias was due to come into force this year, it is now back on hold,” adding that “you can’t — and shouldn’t — apply for an Etias now.” His advice is that the scheme shouldn’t launch at all until the Entry/Exit System is actually working, which rather undersells how long that condition has already gone unmet.

The Websites That Didn’t Wait for a Launch Date

What the EU hasn’t managed to launch, more than 150 unofficial websites have managed to monetise anyway. European authorities say these sites — some copying the official layout down to convincing domain names — are already charging travellers for a document that doesn’t yet exist to be issued. Frontex, the EU’s border agency, has warned about exactly this risk: data harvesting, identity theft, and fees several times the eventual €20 official price, before the official process has even opened.

It’s a tidy inversion of how these things normally work: usually bureaucracy outpaces public awareness. Here, public awareness of a border requirement has outpaced the bureaucracy’s ability to actually open the counter, and a cottage industry of scam sites has filled the gap in the meantime. Abta’s own research found that public awareness of the EU’s new border checks rose from 41% in 2024 to 56% now — a lot of people bracing for a requirement that, on the evidence so far, may not exist by the time most of them next travel.

None of this has been cost-free for travellers who’ve already encountered the related Entry/Exit System at the border this summer: Abta’s surveys found only 46% of visitors got through full checks without incident, half of those waited under 30 minutes, and 13% queued for an hour. The EU, for its part, has said it won’t penalise border posts that quietly suspend Entry/Exit checks when queues grow too long — an admission that the system everyone is waiting on, before the system everyone is also waiting on, doesn’t reliably work either.

So the official advice to a traveller who wants to do this properly is: wait for a scheme with no start date, to follow a scheme that gets switched off whenever it’s inconvenient, while paying nothing to the more than 150 people who are already happy to take your money for the privilege of waiting with you.