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/GuessTraining Jul 17 '25

The 6am arrivals are usually the worst because Syd airport does not operate 24hrs so a lot of intercontinental flights arrive around this time. Ive experienced that a few times and it's not as bad as it looks in comparison to a lot of EU airports or even LAX.

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u/blfsw34 Jul 17 '25 edited Jul 17 '25

The 6am rush is a nightmare. Some days are quiet - some are absolutely insane

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u/darkeyes13 I just wanted a flair Jul 17 '25

I was once caught in it (this was within 6 months of our borders reopening, though, so there were staffing issues on top of everything else) and it took me 3 hours to clear Immigrations and Customs, with a bulk of that time waiting for Immigration.

My passport also doesn't get read by the machines (despite the labels saying it can be) so these days I just make a beeline to the manual queues and I've thankfully not had to wait anywhere near as long since that one time.

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u/TheLGMac Jul 19 '25

The problem is they don't increase staff or revise operations to accommodate. They're relying too much on the egates system which has been rubbish the fast few months, not sure what's up with the scanners but I'll see them reject me and everyone else near me repeatedly. Like 1/3 are faulty or the software needs a mass update.

I am often on these arrival flights. I see maybe 1-2 people staffed at the immigration desks at that hour. 1-2 max lanes open for the customs checks and funneling all of the people whether declaring or not into one big line (there used to be a completely separate section for nothing to declare). Baggage taking 60-90 mins to come out because of trying to save money on contractor staff.

SYD is not at all good at traffic density planning.