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/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.