Melbourne Airport

Luggage cart service is very poor! 1) Parked car in Multi-Level Long-Term Car-Park and found no trolley on the whole level at all! 2) Waiting for luggage after landing and finding you have to pay $4 to get a trolley!

Domestic T3 terminal was very disappointing. Only 1 toilet past customs which also happened to be a complete mess throughout and had a detectable odour from several meters outside. Flight status boards were somewhat hard to spot and the monitors were rather dim and the print small. Escalators to check in desks were very narrow despite the fact people would be carrying baggage. Very few cafes and a tiny gift shop.

Melbourne airport international arrival is a disgrace. The queue was long and growing it took me more than 2 hours to get out from the airport. I have had to experience this twice this year.

Arriving at domestic terminal was fine departing from international terminal another story. We were not told on check in of the need to complete a departure card we had to fill it in and rejoin a single queue which some jobsworth said we should all be in even if we had priority. We did this only for other priority passengers to stroll up in front of us one of the officials was incredibly rude and not a good advert for Australia. Once we were through this debacle we had to walk miles through loads of shops to the Emirates lounge which in fairness was very nice and the food was good.

A disgrace and an international embarrassment. A queue of over 200 people (yes I had plenty of time to count them) waiting to be processed by 2 customs officials. And the queue was growing. What a joke. The worst airport I have had the misfortune to use but this is my home town so there is not much choice.

I was really impressed at how fast the immigration process is now with E-passports and a very friendly welcome home. However and this really was frustrating our luggage was due on Carousel 5 which happened to have a mass of people lining up for customs. So we had to work a way of getting around all these people to get to the luggage belt. Our luggage was fairly fast to arrive and we got through customs fairly quickly with the bulk of the others that had been waiting already cleared through. It was an improvement on previous visits but still has a way to go to make it quicker / easier / more efficient.

Arrived mid morning from the US to be confronted by chaos. An announcement was made advising that passport processing had been stopped due to overcrowding in the baggage area. At least one self serve machine was not working but eventually found one that was and processed self only to discover that the exit points were seething with people all pushing. There was no organisation and no one to advise people where to go. Many people had got into the self service queue without the required pass and were then fighting against the crowd to get out. Why can't the airport provide cordoned off runs for this like they do at other airports? After getting to the baggage hall it was a struggle to view the inconveniently located board to see which carousel to go to. After a long wait for luggage we proceeded past a customs employee towards the exits only to be then told to return to the back of the hall and get in the line which now snaked around the whole area. I am at a loss to understand why Mr Useless did not have the customer service skills to start directing the traffic at the appropriate time. Doing so would go a long way to calming people instead of making them angrier at the disgrace that is the arrivals hall. An explanation of end of school holidays is no explanation. School holiday dates are listed 5 years in advance- surely enough time to roster staff appropriately. On eventual exit we entered a taxi line where an occasional cab arrived until we realised none were being directed to the rank by the taxi manager. We had to walk down to request a maxi taxi (of which there are not enough) for groups arriving with luggage. There was no sign or person advising that the centre cab rank was not working. Overall a frustrating end to a holiday and after experiencing the efficiency crowd control and organisation of other airports in numerous places I can only say that Melbourne is an embarrassment.

I strongly recommend avoiding Melbourne Airport for international arrivals and stopovers. I arrived around 8pm Friday 3 October on a Singapore Airlines flight seemingly around the same time as Thai Airways Malaysia and Emirates flights. It's not like these arrivals should have been a surprise - they're scheduled flights after all. The passport control queue was long and only got much longer behind me but what was worse was that initially only 3 and later 4 officers were processing international passport holders (and another 3 the Aussie NZ etc. passport holders). I estimate it took me around 90 minutes to get through the airport of which a good 70-80 minutes would have been spent queuing to get my passport looked at for 1 minute. Even flight crew and people in express lanes had to wait an eternity. Meanwhile around 9+ officers were standing in the background doing nothing - infuriating! Why is it that I can get from plane seat through customs and baggage collection and into a taxi in less than 15 minutes at Singapore Changi but in Melbourne it takes hours? Clearly the Melbourne airport's customs regime takes pleasure in wasting millions of human passenger life hours every year in unnecessary queues because they can't schedule their staff properly. The baggage claim and baggage inspection area is a design mess it's impossible to see where you are or where you're meant to be going. Taps in the toilets are old-fashioned ones you have to touch to operate and there are no paper towels to dry hands with. Management of arrivals taxi ranks is chaotic. When I asked the attendant to use a particular cab right in front of me I was instead directed to the one at the front of the queue - who do they think they are to limit my choice of cab company? Overall a primitive airport experience of the sort you'd expect in deepest darkest Africa (with apologies to Africa).

Arrived from Shanghai on MU737 at 9am. Some minutes before my arrival a China Southern plane arrived and some minutes after a Singapore Airlines flight arrived. Even with conservative calculating A332 with 220 pax A333 with 280 pax B773 with 250 pax in total 750 pax arriving at the same time rushing to the immigration. There were 3 counters for non ANZ/USA/GB/SG immigration opened. The line queued all the way back to the first gates. I waited 70 minutes for immigration just to be questioned by a very rude officer. He demanded to see a copy of the booking I made with my hotel. As I only got a confirmation by email I told him that I only had an email and I could show him the email on my mobile. He refused and insisted on a paper confirmation. I was taken aside where the supervisor asked me the same questions once again he didn't asked me about my hotel but my return trip. I showed him the ticket for my return trip from Cairns. He asked me about every single city I planned on visiting and how long I would stay there. He noted everything I said. After another 10 minutes of endless questions he dismissed me. I went downstairs and saw a huge mass of people standing at the baggage claim. That space was so crowded it took me multiple minutes to get to the monitor and then back to the right carousel. At this time 90 minutes had passed since the plane arrived. Normally you think 90 minutes is enough time to get your baggage from the plane on the carousel. Not in Melbourne I waited there an additional 15 minutes before the carousel started moving. As I finally got my baggage I realised that I had to line up again to get out. There was a line going all around the room. I lined up and waited about 60 minutes to get to the customs checkpoint. There were only two officers working and all they did was collect the yellow customs cards. At some point in the queue we were handed a bottle of water from an employee. But besides that the whole experience was just awful. I finally got out at 12.15pm. Over 3 hours after the plane landed. This airport is a huge shame for Melbourne.

We arrived at Melbourne from NZ on Saturday morning and were surprised at the immigration queue reaching back to the arrival gates after snaking through Duty Free! There must have been over 1000 people in the queue for Other Passports. They only had 4 officials dealing with that. [Do the maths - 3 minutes per person = 20 per hour = 80 for the 4 officials =10 (TEN) hours for 800 people.] The Australian passports with only half the zig-zag took us 1 hour to get through. Then the baggage area - the summary board didn't even show our flight. The individual video screen showed the flight but the roll-over of codeshare flight numbers is so slow you have to wait 5 minutes to actually see your flight number. Then the carousels were full because everyone was stuck at immigration!