Are Monday morning arrivals at SYD international always this bad?

[Lynda2475]

Have never once stopped to peruse anything in the arrivals duty free - so whilst they make you walk through Im not sure how much business they get as a result

 

[jase05]

Have never once stopped to peruse anything in the arrivals duty free - so whilst they make you walk through Im not sure how much business they get as a result

Knowing someone that was in management there I think they do more than fine and make an absolute killing.
I too have never purchased anything from there but it appears many do

 

[Daver6]

Knowing someone that was in management there I think they do more than fine and make an absolute killing.
I too have never purchased anything from there but it appears many do

They're actually hurting duty free business. Let's say you're in J and early off the aircraft. Are you really going to slow down to purchase something to find yourself then at the back of the customs and immigration queues? Not a chance!

 

[UP4014]

I'd say that's ok, can I ask the OP what they were expecting at peak hour?

I've taken nearly 2 hours to get out international at Brisbane and we were the only plane there.

 

[RealtimeY]

I've arrived at peak hour a few times on other weekdays and while they were all busy, today was considerably worse. I'm wondering if it's a Monday thing that I can try to avoid or if I've just been lucky all the other times.

 

[zig]

"never seen it so bad"?...

...No, it's normal

Welcome to SYD.

That's what I was going to say. It's normal, it's SYD!!!

 

[Quickstatus]

Cmon people. You don't have to waste time at the Arrivals Duty Free at SYD.

Just get onto the Heinemann App and Click and Collect. Great for those J/F pax who want to keep ahead of the great unwashed.

Disclaimer:
Thank you for flying into Sydney Airport and contributing to my super fund.

 

[MelbFlyer]

Not SYD, but my last international arrival was CX into MEL back in Jan - from getting off the plane to exiting the terminal, the total time was 3hrs.

Waiting for luggage was 2hrs alone.

 

[andytheturtle]

Got into SYD on a Sunday recently at midday. Immigration was fine.

Thought I'd be ahead of everyone with no checked luggage. I headed straight for the Nothing to Declare exit, only to find out that the line has wrapped around more than two luggage carousels around from the other arrivals...

The setup seemed even more chaotic than MEL. In MEL, at least there were ropes to help create a few lines as you move closer to the exit. I saw no ropes to guide people in SYD, and no airport staff around to direct people either. Did SYD think they are so efficient that no lines will form?

At least AKL is upfront about the time secondary screen may take and set aside a decently sized area to line up.

Looking at the morning SYD arrivals listed earlier, I'd remind myself to be patient and breath.

 

[RealtimeY]

The passport control lines in SYD were so long and poorly laid out that the even airport staff were sending people to the wrong line.

 

[exceladdict]

I found a Saturday arrival worse than my two Monday arrivals in terms of queue for customs inspection.

 

[Mattg]

I arrived in SYD on QF128 on a Monday morning a few months ago. So, around 7am. The lines were the worst I've ever seen at this airport for international arrivals.

The longest wait was to get a ticket from the e-gate machines. The trick to get the shortest queue seemed to be to go to the machines closest to the e-gates, i.e. keep walking past the long lines near duty free.

 

[dairyfloss]

I've found that most early morning arrivals into SYD INT were pretty painful, particularly on weekdays, with luggage & then customs queue delays what I would identify as holding things up the most. Removal of the inbound Express Path further aggravated the issue for premium and elite FFs (who at least generally knew what they were doing and could move through quickly).

Something I've observed a few times as well is that poorly planned baggage movement seems to be a problem. I'm not talking here about slow offloads at the gate, which happen and clearly contribute, but rather that luggage belts are seemingly assigned without regard for likely pax movements. For example, one flight's bags (call it Flight A) come onto a belt, when the majority of Flight A's pax have not yet cleared immigration, and/or they are coming through slowly when they do. The belt fills up with Flight A's bags, which just go around & around. Meanwhile another flight (Flight B) is assigned to that same belt, but Flight B's pax have cleared immigration or are coming through much quicker. They are now left waiting in frustration at the carousel while only a few of Flight B's bags trickle on as the bag-feeder allows, because of the belt being full of Flight A's bags.

This had me thinking whether there be [reliable] data available to baggage handling operations around the average time from landing to passing through immigration, based on a flight's origin? I would expect that NZ or SG flights would clear immigration quite quickly, for example, while flights from the sub-continent, China or even the ME3 might be at the higher end of the time scale.

Perhaps I was just overthinking this as I stewed in anger at seeing the same triple glad-wrapped Beverly Hills Polo Club suitcase go by for a 47th lap of SYD Belt 3; or at least, that's how many I counted after I arrived off Flight B.

Cheers,
Matt.

 

[tdimdad]

This had me thinking whether there be [reliable] data available to baggage handling operations around the average time from landing to passing through immigration, based on a flight's origin? I would expect that NZ or SG flights would clear immigration quite quickly, for example, while flights from the sub-continent, China or even the ME3 might be at the higher end of the time scale.

Perhaps I was just overthinking this as I stewed in anger at seeing the same triple glad-wrapped Beverly Hills Polo Club suitcase go by for a 47th lap of SYD Belt 3; or at least, that's how many I counted after I arrived off Flight B.

That kind of data would be very easy to produce, even semi-manually. The best would be to display or even integrate the border control real-time entry counts to the baggage handling: show when the first premium pax for a given flight are through to trigger the premium baggage to sent to the belt, and similarly show when e.g. 25% of the non-premium pax are through and start sending their baggage to the belt.

In a manual mode, they'd collect data for, say, 20 arrivals for each scheduled flight, a simple 'back of the matchbox' calculation and, voila, you have an estimate when it'd be a good time to start sending bag up the belt.

I'd offer this kind of data-driven ops would be a smart way of running the airport. But, alas, only very few Australian organisations seem to be keen to be efficient the smart way...