Melbourne Airport is a joke
Landed at Melbourne Airport last night around 11:30pm and genuinely cannot understand how our international arrivals process is this bad.
For seemingly no reason, they had closed off the main SmartGate kiosk area and were diverting everyone either to the six or so kiosks further down the terminal, or into the queue to be manually processed by Border Force.
Unsurprisingly, this created a massive bottleneck. What made it worse was the attitude of some of the staff. They were shouting at passengers for standing in the bottleneck that their own setup had created, as though hundreds of people getting off international flights were somehow at fault for not knowing where they were supposed to go.
I also watched a child get yelled at for stepping underneath one of the little red flags they’d put up. The staff member angrily told them it was an “active work site.”
If it is such an active work site that a child stepping under a flag is apparently a major safety issue, why are you doing it right in the middle of international arrivals while late night flights are still unloading? Why not wait until the last flights of the night have landed?
The whole thing just felt unnecessarily chaotic, hostile and poorly organised. You arrive back in Melbourne after travelling through airports across Asia that manage huge passenger volumes efficiently, and this is your welcome home.