Traveling from Melbourne to Sydney is easy, even having dropped the Hyundai i20 rental car at East Coast Car Rentals near the airport. I’m at Qantas Domestic in Melbourne in plenty of time for my flight to Sydney.
Sydney International airport is its usual farcical self – the ‘new and improved’ version seems to be worse than the ‘old’ version. As I’m connecting to an international flight to Christchurch, the Sydney domestic to international airport bus is required. The bus is fine, other than having to swerve to avoid a bag that has fallen off the side of the baggage cart traveling in front of us (in the rain). The bus driver is unconcerned….”the next baggage cart to coming along will pick it up”. Assuming of course that the catering truck behind us doesn’t run over it. So if you’re missing a blue soft-sided wheeled duffle bag, or it arrives looking slightly wet and crushed….now you know what happened to it.
I took the ‘express’ lane through departures at the International terminal. I have a certain knack of always picking the slowest queue. Since I last came through in early September, new automatic immigration gates have been installed. Similar to those that read e-passports on arrival into Australia and New Zealand, the new system is a complete mystery to the Chinese woman ahead of me. There are no instructions in ANY language other than English, and that only extends to the instruction to insert your passport into the reader. She manages this, but can’t grasp the signs to stand and face the white monitor (which looks nothing like a camera) to be photographed. The immigration agent does nothing to help her, and she ends up stuck between two gates when the system times out. The immigration agent sees her, but completely ignores her…no reassurance, nothing. Two of us in adjoining queues call to the agent to help her TWICE, but he completely ignores all of us.
Eventually the supervisor ‘frees’ the woman to return to re-enter her passport. I’m trying to point to where she should stand when she retrieves her passport, and it is still touch and go as to whether she understands that the white monitor (the size of an iPad) is a camera.
It’s actually a fast system when you understand what to do – but it is in no way geared to tourists or visitors who are unfamiliar with the automated system, and for those who don’t speak much English – or worse – both. It also looks like the green departure card is on the way out…like the Ebola card, they are just being collected in boxes.
Now that the system is being automated, it’s a good opportunity to get rid of the agents who think their job is to embarrass humiliate people trying to arrive or leave Australia, and employ some multi-lingual customer service agents. Why do we insist on making so hard to legally arrive and depart Australia for everyone – locals, tourists and business visitors alike?
