Travel Tip: IRIS Eye Scanner
April 17, 2008
If you frequently travel through Heathrow and want to beat the Immigration queues when you arrive then sign up for IRIS on your next outbound. It’s an eye-scanning technology that effectively replaces the Immigration officer and passport check, by scanning your iris and checking the data stored on their database. It only takes 5 minutes to sign up, and once you’re in the system you’ll clear immigration in no time on your return leg, you don’t even need to rummage through your bag for your passport. It’s all a bit ‘Minority Report’, but if you can get past the THX1138ness of it all it’ll radically transform your arrival, as you skip past the queues and collect your bags in a matter of minutes.
It’s undeniably cool, but in my experience the queue for IRIS is often longer than the UK/EU/EEA passport queue. T3 at Heathrow seems to be an exception to this rule, though.