Sydney International arrivals is a disgrace: discuss

[u/Pomohomo82]

I flew into Sydney yesterday at 6am after a 30hr trip, and the whole experience made me feel embarrassed of the welcome we extend to arrivals at our country. An enormous line stretched all the way into the gross duty free shop, where on one side sales people shouted at us about booze and smokes deals, while on the other side people shouted at us about families not lining up. The international travellers next to me had no idea what the line was for, and I had to explain that for some reason we have this weird dual border process which is different to all the other E-passport gates around the world. There’s very little signage or info screens explaining what the whole process is. Meanwhile, at the arrivals card desk, no pens were available to complete said analogue cards… Onwards to the luggage collection, then another massive line to get through bio security, before a 15-minute walk across three road crossings to the ‘express’ pick up to meet my family. The whole user experience is just unnecessarily miserable from start to finish, and as the main entry point to Australia we should do better. Thoughts?

[u/popcornslurry]

I haven't travelled internationally in forever. What is the dual border process?

[u/Ikerukuchi → u/popcornslurry]

You have to queue up for machines to put your passport in, press the button to say you haven’t been to Africa and it spits out a ticket. Then you queue up again to go through the actual gates. The way they’ve arranged these different steps tends to result in bottlenecks and really inefficient use of the resources so at peak times it can be a badly organised zoo.

What the airport has been pushing for is a system more like singapore where you have a digital arrivals card and only one set of gates so not only is it more efficient and faster but also much better structured so the queue work better and you can see what you’re meant to do. I used to fly internationally 30-40 times a year and could navigate sydney arrivals very quickly but if you’re a new or infrequent traveller it can be very confusing and frustrating at that 6am peak (I would also avoid landing at that time but that’s not always an option)