Do Schengen visa authorities know how an applicant flew within Schengen on their previous visit?

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She is now worried about flying within Schengen, as she wonders if the visa authorities can access her flight history

Intra-Schengen flights generally don't require you to enter anything except your name when booking the ticket and likewise nobody verifies/scans your passport number, date of birth and place of birth when you proceed to the gate. Therefore even if they decided to look up the history of flights within the Schengen area for some reason, things would be complicated by the fact that people of the same namesake could be flying in Europe as well.

An additional complication is that AFAIK there isn't a shared database of every passenger on every Schengen flight, so it would take a lot of effort for the consulate to try and track each and every applicant. Not to mention that you can also take a ferry or drive out of Finland, which would be practically impossible to trace.

Or are the entry/exit stamps the only thing that matters?

Practically speaking - yes, that's the only thing that they care about. Enter the Schengen through Finland a few times and you're good to go as far as they know.

Upvote:1

On an internal Schengen flight, your friend will not go through emigration/immigration controls. She will go through a security check, which will include a check of her identity.

So the information may end up in some official database at the airport. Nobody knows what kind of data analysis they will do with that in the future. There could be another terror attack, or the refugee numbers rise again, and the Schengen nations might decide to compare their databases more closely than they do now. Or political majorities change and this happens even without a dramatic event.

She should not lie in her visa application. If the Schengen authorities find out, they will be really unhappy.

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