The long-haul flight in economy was excruciating. I found the distances between terminals at Dubai gruelling and the immigration and security queues everywhere daunting.
RUSTY LAKE HOTEL MOVIE
It was as if I was setting out for the first time, a newbie at international travel, in the days when they had one movie playing on a screen in the economy cabin. My first overseas trip after two years took weeks of obsessive planning, navigating all the new rules and gathering all the travel essentials I'd misplaced, such as electrical adaptors, compression socks and neck pillow. If you're in any way challenged physically, you need to super-charge these skills.
With all the changing regulations and the new apps holding vaccination certificates and digital immigration forms, travellers need better organisational skills than ever and more stamina for the longer time spent in lines. Passengers didn't put on extra flights to cope with demand, the airlines did. They've had a lot of time to get an expected surge in passengers right. The Easter holiday period shouldn't have taken the airlines or airport by surprise. Also, they expect that the infrastructure around the journey, from check-in to collecting luggage, works smoothly. They expect the plane will reach its destination safely and approximately on time. Like many other travellers, I took umbrage at this. Staffing issues were exacerbated by customers who were no longer "match fit" for flying, he said. Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce contributed his point of view. People were forgetting to take their laptops out of their luggage when passing through security, packed aerosols and nail scissors, or generally forgot the well-honed rules of airport security that had been second nature before the pandemic. You can hardly blame passengers and yet this is what Sydney airport management did, placing some of the responsibility on "inexperienced" travellers who slowed the screening process. Many of these employees were absent due to close contact rules. The security company in charge was still trying to rebuild its workforce, which was depleted during the pandemic. In this case, the holiday season, one of the busiest ever, collided with staff shortages, which seemed like poor planning as much as misfortune. "Missed connection" are the worst two words in travel.
Although it rarely happens, the idea the plane will leave without you is harrowing. Arriving at an airport, excited about the trip, only to find an unexpected bottleneck at check in and security. A reduced number of security lanes in the departure hall created a backlog, causing long lines of weary passengers to snake out of the buildings. Scenes of chaos met travellers at Sydney airport's domestic terminals in the lead-up to the holidays. Passengers queue at Sydney Airport on Wednesday.