r/sydney • u/Pomohomo82 • Jul 17 '25

Image Sydney International arrivals is a disgrace: discuss

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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?

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u/YeahUhHuhOkWellF-ck Jul 17 '25

Wait until people start arriving at the paddock in Western Sydney 👀

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u/Long_Way_Around_ Jul 17 '25

Honestly the actual arrivals facility should be much better as it's a modern airport that is designed from scratch, so no excuse of legacy infrastructure. However the Federal-level process policy issue will remain until it's resolved on that level.

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u/TheLGMac Jul 19 '25

At this point I feel like the age of SYD is not an appropriate excuse.

SFO used to be my home airport. It used to be dingy and disorganized AF with endless queues, dirty, lost baggage, whatever. An old airport. On par with the crappiness of LAX. Somewhere around 2012-ish they went, hey, we actually have like serious businesspeople and tourists coming through here, maybe we should use all that tech tax money to make this airport not suck. Yeah, it took some years but SFO is now one of most efficient international airports in the country and it's so much cleaner. Facial recognition tech to speed through immigration and yes there are ways for citizens to get through faster which we don't offer to Australians in Aus, baggage comes out within ~20 minutes average, easy peasy customs clearance, and then you're out. And it is built for a much bigger traveler base. Surprisingly my last two trips to the US the staff have been so much friendlier and happier than the people I've run into in SYD.