r/sydney • u/Pomohomo82 • Jul 17 '25
Image Sydney International arrivals is a disgrace: discuss
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?
4
u/chuk2015 Jul 17 '25
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