Sydney Kingsford Smith Airport

Perhaps it was partly the effect of being 32 hours into my travel itinerary already, or that I only had about a half an hour after we landed before my Sydney to Singapore flight started boarding due to the delays in Vancouver, although there was a good hour of boarding time so I actually had about 1.5 hours to make it there. But whatever it was, I found the part of Sydney Airport I was stuck in to be one of the most onerous and terrible airports I’ve ever had the pleasure of being in. It’s saying something when I rank Edmonton International Airport higher than yours, Sydney. And there were so many reasons why the Sydney airport experience sucked.

Firstly, WiFi. Besides being spotty in general, it’s a rare airport when the local airport’s free WiFi doesn’t reach the passengers in the plane when the plane is docked at the gate. This was not as important coming in, but I did notice it then since I couldn’t use my phone like I normally did after landing and before disembarkation, to tell people that I had successfully landed. It’s very anti-foreigner/visitor. It was a much greater irritation factor when we were stuck at the gate on the way out and I had no way to relay that or amuse myself on the Internet to pass the time for 30 minutes either.

Secondly, unclear arrival signage and routes. When we arrived, we alighted the plane into a kind of back corridor arrival gate area that was different from a departure gate with seats and the counter and such. This thing was just a funneling corridor that led to a 3-way T-junction. To the back was the way I had arrived from, to the left was a similar-looking corridor with a couple machines of some sort and then a sharp turn out of sight, and straight ahead was a passage that went through a duty free mall and then ended up at a bunch of machines and some Customs gates. At the 3-way junction, there was a sign that said something like “Domestic Arrivals” or “Customs Processing” or something, pointing ahead through the duty-free mall. But there was also a sign pointing ahead that said something like “International Transit Processing”, whereas a very similar sign that said “International Transits” pointed left. The exact wording might be slightly off, I don’t remember. But the two signs were only one word off and it didn’t really make any sense to me that they were pointing in opposite directions. Where was I to go? In addition, my boarding pass did not have a gate number on it, and there were absolutely no TVs displaying the departure schedule of planes in this section of the airport for some reason like there are in most other airports.

Before we left the plane, there was an announcement made about connecting flights due to the delays, listing a few Australia/NZ-based local ones and how they were being rebooked/rescheduled, and to go see the airline reps waiting at the arrival gate if anyone had any questions. When I asked on the way out, they told me that my flight was still fine, I didn’t have to go collect checked baggage (despite the announcement that “everyone” should) as it would follow me, and to go see if I could get a buggy ride from a buggy at the bottom of the ramp to my gate if it was there. It wasn’t, so I had kept on walking down the path until I got to that confusing part.

Now that I was stuck there, I went back up again to the Air Canada airline reps and not only were they able to give me my flight number, all of the passengers had now departed the plane as well, so one of them walked me over back to the junction, looked at the signage, and pointed me left. Yay! So I went left and followed the passage.

And hit a dead end. After some walking, I did indeed find the gate for my Singapore plane, Gate 51, but it was the arrival gate, and was just a featureless door with no seats and no counter, next to another featureless door for a gate number adjacent to my gate. There was another gate or passage or something that was open, but as I started going up that passage, I was able to tell that this was also some sort of arrival passage as there were a horde of people coming down it. There was also no way a buggy would have fit going up that thing. So I turned around and went back down.

I did notice a lady on a buggy talking on a walkie-talkie in the dead end corner though, and I approached her to ask for directions. She took one look at my ticket, and told me to hop on. She finished her call and then started driving. Bbugggy ride! Wheee,

That’s her driving the buggy. I didn’t catch her name, although I think I saw the name Sheraton on the ID tag around her neck at some point. Or an uncommon name (i.e. not Sheralyn) very close to the name of the hotel chain I stayed in in Vancouver. She drove me back to the intersection, went through the duty-free mall strip, and then took a sharp right turn after the mall strip, where there was a tiny floor sign pointing toward an obscured side passage with another International Transfers (or something) sign. We picked up another confused and lost transit passenger, and she then drove us through that corridor, through yet another duty-free mall strip, and then a side service corridor so that we could avoid going through a THIRD duty-free mall strip. Finally, we ended up at a small side doorway thing and were told to get in line there and filter our way through the usual baggage checks before we could go to our gates. Annoying, but standard, and it was progress!

Fourthly, not enough arrival signage. Maybe I missed one or two small screens while on the buggy, but I don’t recall seeing them, which is a bad sign in and of itself for people trying to figure out connections. I did finally see a TV screen at the International Transit queue line:

And was amused that the status for my flight (and others that were on time but had not started boarding yet) said Relax. I had heard from the Air Canada rep earlier that my flight had been delayed but I didn’t see that reflected here. I wasn’t sure how accurate it was since it still showed flights that were supposed to be gone as still being in Gate Open or Final Call status though.

Fifth, there was only one single queue processing International Transfers, so it took about 15 minutes to get through it even though it was a relatively short line. It felt like we were an afterthought. I passed through the metal detector fine, but was selected at random to be more thoroughly searched anyway, which consisted of a hand-sized detector device being waved around me and my luggage. Better than the family in front of me that got something like 10 tubes of toothpaste confiscated because they were well over their limit of what Australia allowed in carry-on luggage, even though they were just transitting through.

The last irritation I remember was the walk to the departure gate. After passing through that International Transit scan, I went up an escalator and was finally in the main airport departures area. I could see my plane out the window, and it wasn’t far at all, but when I got to the gate, I found it blocked by a pane of glass. I could see the check-in counter for my Gate 51 on the other side of the glass, and I was maybe about 10 feet away from it. Yet, to actually get TO that counter, i had to walk for about 2-3 more minutes, past three large shops (one was shuttered) trying to sell me overpriced airport stuff, then skirting the edge of a food court, and then all the way back down the back wall of the shops where there were a large number of seats for the departure gate, before I finally could reach that counter.

It felt like Sydney was trying to not only penny-pinch by providing their guests as minimal and cheap an experience (WiFi, poor signage, poor layout, lack of arrival screens) as possible, but also trying to shove as much shopping as possible into their faces in order to extract as much money from them as possible before letting them move on. The whole experience felt like it was designed by an Electronic Arts executive or something.