Dear Aussie Friends,
as much as I love your beautiful Country, as much as I agree with all the rankings that are positioning Melbourne and Sydney amongst the most livable cities in the world, I cannot prevent myself from pointing out that… your airports really sucks!
Honestly, with my limited traveling experience (some of the airports I have visited in the last 3 years: Amsterdam, London, Berlin, Milan, New York, Buenos Aires, Shanghai, Bangkok, Bali, Beijing, Jakarta, Singapore, Hanoi, Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Seoul, Bangalore, Mumbai, New Delhi, Guangzhou, Kuala Lampour, Penang, Melbourne, Sydney), I rank Australian airports at the very bottom of the list, which to me is close to the worst in the world. Why do I say that? Based on my Customer Experience (= the quality of time spent waiting for flying).
If usually you need to arrive at the airport a couple of hours before departure time, that does not apply to Melbourne and Sydney, where you need three hours to make sure you don’t lose the flight, while going through cumbersome processes, moving slowly from one line to the other.
Where is the Customer Experience broken? First line: check in. Everywhere else this is a 5’ to 20’ line. But in our infamous aussi airports this is easily a 45’ to 60’ stand up process. Second line: security check. I do not pretend all the airports to be as organized as Changi (Singapore), where the security is straight at the gate, bringing down to zero the waiting time. But also don’t expect to stand in line another 30’ before scanning my hand luggage and my body. Third line (this is driving me really crazy): immigration. While I can (barely) understand an immigration line entering the Country, it does not make any sense to line up for another 60’ people that is simply trying to leave Australia, filling useless paper cards, instead of speeding up the process with fingerprints and face recognition. Fourth line: now that you hurry up to the gate, no time for a relaxing drink, for buying magazines or shopping around, you are stuck with a messy line at the gate, no seats, just standing up with hundreds of people and their luggage. And worst of all: no free-wifi access (across the four lines).
For each of the painfully broken moments-of-truth, there are quick fixes that can dramatically improve the customer experience. Partly has to do with more people managing the traveler inflow, but mostly has to do with the designing an experience centered on traveler needs and expectation, enabled by modern technology infrastructure. Nothing magic, plenty to learn from better managed airports: from Changi to KLIA, just to stay close in the APAC region.
The return on investment can be high. The better the customer experience, the more money people will spend in the airport facilities (shops and restaurants). Please do something. Don’t make any single trip to Australia a real pain.
1 Comment
Interesting feedback. Not much experience in Asia, but the IMHO the Almaty airport in Kazakhstan is not far behind, not so much because of long lines, but because nobody speaks a word of english. It is a rather small airport with limited amenities; there are two flights leaving for Istanbul fifteen minutes from each other and you think you are lining up to the only gate while there is another one downstairs (while you don’t even KNOW there is a downstairs). They must be quite used to foreigners getting confused, though, because a clerk came looking for me while I was in (the wrong) line, rescuing me.