Melbourne Airport

Melbourne guided us around ever decreasing circles to access facilities with no moving pathways to help us. Absolutely exhausting toilets difficult to find few refreshment areas selling decent food or hot drinks. Parking charges extortionate with again a long walk. Recent building extensions badly designed quite unwelcoming.

Melbourne should be ashamed of this outdated and shabby structure. I have used the airport at least a dozen times over the past 2 years and it has to be one of worst I have ever been in. On inbound international flights you enter a bland and underwhelming building only to be met by long lines at immigration (worst wait is about 2 hours) then you trudge down to the baggage carousel area which has been under construction for 2 years and still has bit of ceiling falling down. Then another huge wait of 200+ people to get through quarantine. Departing flights are just as bad. A cold concrete structure with little natural light and poor design. Domestic security is fairly easy to get through and the Jetstar terminal is acceptable though more seating is needed at boarding gates. International departures again have huge line ups to get through immigration which then leads to a marathon like jaunt of twists and turns to get to your boarding gate - easily a 10 minute walk through duty free shops restaurants that make it the least direct route to boarding gates. Parking is the most expensive I've ever experienced. I read a report that the airport rakes in over $100 million a year in parking. So how about using that money to build a new airport.

The airport is ugly from the outside with countless signs barriers poor locations for buildings few gardens and so on. The car parking is ridiculously expensive. The inside is tired and old. The floors dirty the concrete floors near the taxi queues filthy. The taxis are usually horrible and dirty. The shopping is miserable the food average and outer suburb grade. When you land the entrance is underwhelming. The baggage queues are ridiculous and test everyone's patience. Customs and baggage queues can stretch 200-300 people. Overall its abysmal compared to Singapore or Bangkok or Hong Kong. Its a shocking example of how Asia is leaving this country behind. Industry ratings of this airport (good) are highly unrepresentative.

Come on Melbourne get your act together and find out what passengers really want! I've been through the airport a few times now and really believe things are getting worse. Long waits of 2 hours at immigration aren't needed by passengers whether this happens all day or only in the morning I don't know but only 5-6 immigration desks isn't good for peoples patience. The only advantage to this is to give ground staff extra time to get luggage on to the carrousels. On leaving the country we now have to take a long walk through the shopping mall. On a positive note the airport has lots of good facilities its clean and relatively tidy and staff are polite friendly and helpful.

We arrived at 06.30 on a fairly full Qantas 380 from Singapore. Expecting the worse we were pleasantly surprised perhaps because of luck perhaps because of planning. We were quickly off the 380 because we got seats near the front of economy hence when we arrived at Immigration the queues were short. Staff were moving non nationals into the nationals line as soon as a booth became free and we had none of the long queues reported elsewhere. We looked back and the line looked reasonably short. Whilst our bags took a long time to come this was because they were some of the last to come off the plane - the carousel was full of bags by the time we got there. The pain came when we had to check-in for our domestic connection - we had to take our bags landside and check-in again rather than being able to use a fast bag drop airside. The new Qantas bag automatic bag checkers accepted one of our bags but not the other and so human intervention was required (others were also having trouble). Never-the-less we have experienced worse. I suspect the terminal would be under strain if a number of big jets arrived at the same time we had chosen a flight when this would not be the case. The terminal looked shabby and tired and would benefit from a facelift.

Mixed review here - arriving from Wellington I went through the Smart Gate very quickly there was a long delay picking up bags due to unloading machinery failure but if it hadn't been for that we'd have had a speedy arrival. Returning was an entirely different story and one I wouldn't care to repeat. We arrived at Tullamarine before 10am to see a really long and ever-growing Air NZ queue and only 3 to 5 check-in positions open and staff seemed to be going to and fro seeking advice querying passports etc. Through to equally long queues at the x-ray machines and no let-up at immigration where half the positions were manned. No sign of a Smart Gate which surely would have eased the pressure. Finally got airside to then negotiate the maze of shops our departure gate wasn't clearly identified. Wake up Melbourne/Tullamarine! This is not an efficient international airport all of the time.

Avoid Melbourne if you can. After been kept onboard until we got a gate we then had to wait for some one to come and operate the airbridge. We used our epassports (one worked and one didn't) luckily they had a dedicated desk for failed epassport clearance as the regular line went all the way back to the duty free shops. We then had to fight to reach the baggage carousel as the area was very crowded. The exit queue system is a shambles several queues feed into one and people push their way through. For something that has just been renovated the design doesn't work.

Arrival 07.00 on a Sat and at best an embarrassment. Old tired aerobridges and a shabby low-ceilinged arrival concourse. The obligatory gymkhana through a tired duty-free and to the throngs at passport control. Fortunately I used Smart Gate and was able to bypass the queue. I was expecting queues at baggage but there were throngs of people around each carousel at least 6-7 deep all intermingled with the queue for the exit all made painfully slow by overzealous quarantine checks. Simply renovating or adding bits to a structure that is over 40 years old is clearly not the solution to a facility that has outlived its use.

Arrival at 8am on a Saturday morning 2 hours from exiting plane to getting street side. Queues to get to immigration extended back through the duty free shopping area lots of empty immigration counters. Once through almost impossible to get to the baggage carousel due to the masses of people waiting to exit. The terminal is tired and dirty facilities are limited - chaotic and shambolic are the only fitting descriptions.

The arrival and departure experience at T2 (International) continues to suffer from the upgrading of the departure and arrival areas. There are far too many people arriving or departing at peak hours to cope with the current infrastructure. For example I have arrived between 5-7 am three times in the past month from overseas only to experience an hour long wait each time - waiting for my bag then standing in a long line waiting to exit. This part of the terminal is far below the standards it should be for what has been a world-class airport. While improvement works are under way they should have been started a year or two earlier.