Americans will need to get fingerprinted soon to enter much of Europe: Here's how to be prepared.

There seems to always be a new thing happening to make travel increasingly stressful and frustrating and here's the latest: Beginning October 12, Europe will be launching their Entry-Exit System (also known as EES).

What this means to tourists holding a U.S. passport is that we will now have to get fingerprinted and photographed when entering any European country that is in the Schengen area.

While this sounds all very extra, there's a reason for this: As tourists, we're actually only allowed to visit that area for 90 days out of every 180 days, and now they can make sure we're doing that without having to sit there and scroll through our passport to check all the stamped pages. But don't think that means you'll be able to leave that passport at home: Even though you're supplying all that biometric data, it's still necessary to carry your passport with you.

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This means passport screening is about to take even more time, so you're going to want to allow for that when traveling, especially when dealing with tight flight connections.

Of course, this is a bummer for those of us who really enjoyed those stamps in our passports…

Confused? Join the club. There's lots more info on the official EES website.

Yahoo CreatorAly WalanskyAly Walansky is a NYC-based food & travel writer. She has been rated top food journalist online by Muck Rack and pens a Substack newsletter that goes out to 10,000 industry pros daily.FollowFollow