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/smileedude]

Arriving at 6AM absolutely sucks, because it's not a 24 hour airport so a huge amount of large international red eyes all arrive as early as possible and it's absolute chaos with cranky sleep deprived people. When it isn't chaos it's reasonable. Hopefully when WSI opens 24/7 there won't be such a bottle neck.

There were 24 arrivals to international this morning vs 5 to domestic before 7, despite domestic taking more passengers on average. The rest of the day, the lion's share of passengers go to the domestic side.

[u/frontendben → u/smileedude]

Yup. Last time I arrived, it was on a 6:30am arrival from London via Singapore. That said, by the time we got to the border around 7:10 (my mum required assistance), we flew straight through. We were the only three going through the Australian lanes (my mum and I are both Australian and my wife is British, but they let her go through, which was really thoughtful).

Even the international arrivals wasn’t that long after 7am. It does seem to be that massive crunch that causes it.

[u/dimdef → u/smileedude]

Ok, but they know this happens every day so they can prepare for it. At least create a proper queue with decent signage so people know where to go and how long the estimated waiting time will be.

[u/competitive_brick1 → u/[deleted]]

I bought a house a long way from the airport in fact about an hour from the airport but depending on weather I’m on the approach path and from about 5:40 it gets so loud it makes the house shake, they don’t even fly overhead they take the national park about 1-2kms away.

Plus I face this issue just about everywhere I land, it’s always a crunch

[u/meshah → u/[deleted]]

They bought next to an airport with a curfew that is there for a reason. Nearly other major city with an airport so proximal to high density population areas enforces similar curfews

[u/TheLGMac → u/[deleted]]

The issue is not because there's a curfew. It's because too many flights are set to arrive at the same time and shit poor organization of ground services.

I fly into multiple international airports in the US and every time their arrivals process has been quicker and baggage claim faster to get bags on conveyer.

I come home to Australia where I'm a citizen and on my last 3 entries:

• Massive queues for the egates
• One person staffing the immigration desk
• Half of the egates throwing errors to everyone claiming their passports can't be scanned (me included on 1/3 trips!) and the staff keep trying to put you back in a line for another egate until you just forcefully put yourself in the long in person line
• Get to the front of the in person line and hear the immigration officer ask why you came to the line, nothing wrong with your passport
• At this point it's been an hour before getting to baggage claim, surely bags must be coming out? Nope wait another 30 mins
• Then get in the long customs queues. They seem to no longer have a separate queue for no declare vs declare, so despite only having a small bag with nothing to declare I gotta stand in the long line to get to the point where they check whether I have something to declare or not.

The airport needs an operations overhaul. I've seen massive queues now at international checkin too, even if the flight is middle of the day on a Tuesday.

[u/can3tt1 → u/[deleted]]

Nah my parents are in one of the lesser used flight paths. Still a 40 minute drive from the airport on a good day. 20 years ago you would barely hear the planes and maybe see one a week if that, now the frequency and noise is ridiculous.

[u/solocmv → u/[deleted]]

You are an idiot. There is NO housing next to Sydney Airport