A bug in Europe's new Entry/Exit System is recording some British travellers as overstaying in the Schengen area even when they haven't — and novelist Jojo Moyes has become the highest-profile victim.

Moyes was stopped at Marseille airport and told by French border guards she could face a two-year ban and a €10,000 (roughly £8,360) fine if she tried to re-enter the EU. Her apparent offence: an exit from Portugal in May that the system never logged. In reality, she had spent just 23 days in the Schengen zone across six months — well within the 90-days-in-180 rule that applies to UK passport holders since Brexit. She has since had to hire an immigration lawyer to get her record corrected.

Consumer group Which? says dozens of British travellers have run into the same problem, with the system failing to register departures from EU destinations and so falsely counting days as overstay. The EU has now launched legal action against IBM and two other European tech firms over the glitches and the repeated border delays the rollout caused this summer. The UK Foreign Office says it is aware of reports of inaccurate records — including incomplete data and registration of people who shouldn't be in the system at all — and is raising the issue with the European Commission.

The EES became fully operational on 10 April 2026, replacing passport stamps with biometric checks: fingerprints and a headshot taken at the border. Because your days in the zone are now tracked digitally rather than stamped by hand, an unlogged exit can quietly snowball into a breach on paper.

There's a fix, and it's worth doing before you travel. The EU's official EES online tool lets you enter the country you plan to visit plus your passport number to see whether you're cleared to enter ('OK' or 'not OK') and how many days you have left in your 180-day allowance. Anyone who has visited the Schengen area since April should check this — if the figures look wrong, you'll need to request a correction. Which? recommends going to the Travel to Europe data protection page, finding the country you last left, and emailing that country's Data Controller to ask for your record to be reviewed and updated. Border officers at external borders can also tell you how many days you technically have remaining — worth asking on the spot if something seems off.

For anyone planning a European trip this year, this isn't just bureaucratic noise: a false overstay flag could mean refusal of entry or a fine at the border, so a two-minute check ahead of booking could save an expensive headache.