Melbourne Airport

✅ Trip Verified | Access to Melbourne Airport remains difficult because of no rail connection and only limited drop-off time allowed. The number of check-in desks in international departures (T2) is huge but signage is good. Security and passport control were an endurance test: queues remain long in security and security staff were humourless. Melbourne has regrettably adopted the same security system as other airports like Charles de Gaulle and Brussels, in which passengers are simultaneously allotted stalls for pushing belongings onto the belt. This means competition to get one´s belongings on the belt and the likelihood of being widely separated from your belongings by the time you get through personal screening. Very stressful. Shopping on the airside is somewhat limited: a huge duty-free area, selling the same luxury goods as every other airport, but very few shops selling distinctively local items (other than tourist souvenirs made in Asia). Only two eating options in evidence: a burger outlet and a Italian-style cafe. Seating in the gate area was very limited and priority boarding not clearly indicated.

✅ Trip Verified | T3 at Melbourne Airport has been redesigned since our last experience in 2022. The changes are not necessarily improvements. We had to print our own boarding pass and baggage tag and load onto the conveyor belt. The system malfunctioned and we had to call for help. There is no direct access to departure gates (as previously); passengers now have to walk a long way to T4 to get through security, then the same distance back to reach the beginning of the concourse. All right for those without mobility problems. The airport is as ever dirty.

✅ Trip Verified | Melbourne is easily the worst airport in Australia for arrival. Corridors are dirty and there is a long walk from the arrival gate to immigration. We had to wait ages for our luggage to arrive. Incredibly, there is still no train service from the airport (unlike Brisbane and Sydney). Pick-up arrangements for private cars are confusing and poorly signposted.

Not Verified | Chalk and cheese when compared to Dubai at my last business trip. Despite the “modernization” work, T2 is still old and tired, especially the arrival side. Reminds me of the old LAX. The custom declaration self service stations appear to be placed at complete random position along the passageway to immigration. Luggage came out of carrousel at random order and took ages. Management clearly missed the point about putting out priority luggage first is important passenger flow control, so you don’t get entire plane load of people all waiting for bags and clearing customs at the same time. T1 is also old but at least it is reasonably efficient.

✅ Trip Verified | Terminal 4 is horrendous. It is new, yet looks and feels very outdated. The walk to the gate is massive and when you finally arrive there are no seats. Elderly and people with mobility issues have to stand. They have walking escalators, yet half weren’t working.

Not Verified | Flying from terminal 3 you have to walk to terminal 4 for screening then back to terminal 3 to the gate as they removed screening at T3. So the passengers are inconvenienced but the airport cares little about passengers which is evident by the lack of facilities. The airport is past its use by date and needs to expand and improve in every way.

✅ Trip Verified | We waited for 1.5 hours for our luggage, and our next flight is only 2 hours away from the first flight. It’s so unacceptable and we don’t know why it must take Melbourne airport such a long time for us to collect luggage. Another thing is, we didn’t expect to collect our luggage during the transit. We booked our ticket thru flight centre, from Queenstown back to Adelaide, but need to transit from Melbourne. We have traveled a lot and Melbourne is the only airport which we need to collect our luggage during a transit! And we waited so long and almost missed our next flight! So bad. We learnt a lesson - don’t come anyway near Melbourne airport!!

✅ Trip Verified | I’ve been through more than 100 international airports, and Melbourne is consistently the worst to exit through. The staff are rude, the systems usually fail, the conveyors are overtaxed, the facilities dirty and dark. I’m embarrassed to be from Melbourne whenever I land. This is serious, it’s the literal worst airport in the developed world. I’ve been to better airports in Africa.

Not Verified | Worst airport experience of my life. I travel from America to Australia every 6 months to see family and each time that has a connection in Melbourne is terrible. On my recent trip this past July, many problems almost cost me my flight back home. First, my plane arriving in Melbourne from Canberra sat on the tarmac for an absurdly amount of time for some unknown reason and all the passengers were forced to remain seated for 30 minutes as they had difficulties on the ground. My layover was only 1hr and 20 minutes so this 30 minute obstacle is really what done it for me. I pack everything in my carry-on so that I can avoid checked luggage issues and hauling up my 15kg suitcase up three flights of stairs was truly humbling, but not as much humbling as hauling them up and down TWO sets of broken escalators (twice) because of the misleading if not non-existent signage to the international terminal. I wasted so much time just being lost. And not ONE staff member could be found. I was panicked, lost, and finally found a worker passing by in a bright yellow vest (the kind who work on the tarmac) and I asked her for discretions. She was very short with me and laughed a little at the sight of how panicked I was. By the time she led me to the entrance of security (which by the way did not say anything about “connections, security, international” (the signs said something like Concourse G, no wonder I was lost), I got a notification on my phone saying my group was ready to board. Once I’d made it past and through to my gate, I was one of the last ones walking onto the plane. I couldn’t imagine what would’ve happened if I’d missed my plane back home due to the negligence and poor customer support on behalf of this airport. I’m a young solo woman traveller and feeling unsafe and lost in a city where no one knows me is not a good feeling at all. I’ve learned my lesson and I’ll book my tickets with connections through Sydney from now.

✅ Trip Verified | It is a long time since I had arrived at the international terminal at Melbourne. The first problem was, despite my aircraft arriving on time, my aircraft having to wait about 15 minutes for the gate to be free - poor apron coordination. There was then a very long walk to get to the first immigration kiosks (only a small number of kiosks) which had huge queues which I bypassed then another fairly longish walks to the final immigration kiosks which again had queues and again only a small number of kiosks. The actual immigration gates had no queues due to the limited number of kiosks meaning everyone was waiting in queues at the kiosks. The baggage carousel that was allocated to my flight also had bags arriving from 2 other flights which mean that bags were piling up high on the carousel and it was very difficult to retrieve some bags in the top area of the carousel and other passengers were having to help people to retrieve their bags - it is only a matter of time before someone gets hurt trying to retrieve their bag in this type of situation. Long walks were required in the customs/biosecurity queue lanes - firstly having to go back around the baggage carousels and then going one way then back the other way in the queue lane - the area needs to be redesigned. All in all worse than many third world airports. I think that people from other countries must get a rude shock on their first arrival at Melbourne airport.