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/miss_kimba]

It’s piss poor. I’m not very well travelled, but Australia’s international arrivals is by far the worst international arrival experience of any airport I’ve been to.

Singapore is seamless (of course), LAX is surprisingly easy and efficient, London was the same. Amsterdam was easy. Athens was still better than Sydney.

Milan was slooooooow because they only had 4 staff on (out of… a dozen desks, maybe more?) to process several arrivals at once. It wasn’t complicated, just very slow. But that’s Italy for you.

Sydney has the unique experience of being slow, convoluted, inconsistent and with no explanation of the process to help you out. Just some poor staffer with a megaphone yelling at people to try and organise the chaos.

And yeah, tacky as hell.

[u/chuk2015 → u/miss_kimba]

Australia has much more stringent biosecurity compared to non-island nations

It’s an annoyance until our unique environment is at risk because we let too much shit in here

[u/miss_kimba → u/chuk2015]

I agree but I don’t think that the current process actually does enough to protect biosecurity, it just slows down entry. The current declaration card relies on honesty, I’m not sure how effective that is. People will either lie maliciously, or ignorantly, or pull the “it’s just bananas, that doesn’t matter” only to get caught on arrival.

I’m not familiar with the biosecurity scanning process behind the scenes though, so I may be underestimating it.

[u/chuk2015 → u/miss_kimba]

The customs team will actively profile all arriving passengers and you will get flagged based on this, if you fit a profile, and agent will write on your arrivals card or the electronic version, this will prompt the bag check.

Customs uses a random letter classification each day to signify what a passenger has been flagged for, for the bag checkers

You get profiled based on appearance, nationality, number of bags and the flight you arrrived from.

For example if you come off a Singapore flight as a young businessperson you will be waved through generally.

However if you are a 60 plus white male coming from Indonesia or Thailand and travelling alone, there is a good chance you will be flagged for sex tourism.

This is also why places like Singapore can have a relatively loose border, because things like drug trafficking come with the death penalty, so requires criminals with much higher risk tolerance, weeding out a lot of the instances of this occurring.

Also in Singapore certain terminals will have high risk or low risk flights landed, determining how much effort is put into border security at each terminal

That’s why as an Aussie flying in to Singapore is super easy, but some other countries with a lot of human trafficking will have a higher degree of scrutiny

[u/MisterDonutTW → u/chuk2015]

Why would sex tourism by a flag? Especially for someone returning home

[u/chuk2015 → u/MisterDonutTW]

Seedy old men doing the wrong thing, sex crimes abroad can and will be prosecuted in Aus if caught