Sydney International Airport is a joke. This is one of the richest countries on earth, so why is the toilet door off its hinge? And why are there always queues outside the women’s toilets. Also why does all the food taste like photocopy paper and why does the immigration area feel like you are trapped in an iron blouse? It’s airless, there’s a smell of yesterday’s donut mixed with armpit and the constant threat of an anal probe.
Sorry to get political, but this is what happens when you outsource to the private sector. Turns out it’s fairly efficient not to clean the toilets properly and not to build enough in the first place (let ’em queue, let ’em queue). It it costs nothing to lease to food outlets at extortionate prices so they cannot provide food that doesn’t taste like a service station. It’s fairly easy to cut off natural light and even easier to provide bad chairs. Comfort, be gone! They want you as uncomfortable as possible so you will get out of your annoying chair and go shopping.
Sydney Airport can get away with being third rate because we have the world’s finest harbour, so anything else, like say infrastructure doesn’t matter. Also Sydney Airport is not on the way to anywhere in particular. We are not Singapore or Dubai, vying to become a gateway airport and not much publicity is ever given to Sydney Airport. As soon as visitors arrive and are shunted into the blinking sunshine their airport hell is forgotten, just a piece of airport roadkill in their great overseas adventure. Ditto as soon as we locals leave, Sydney Airport just becomes part of the pre-travel lead up nightmare. No-one talks about it, no-one mentions the airport in blog dispatches, it’s ephemera in the travel experience.
I realise there are more pressing issues in the world, like say fiscal economics and the scourge of deconstructed pop-up food trucks but Sydney is meant to be a world class city and that should mean it has an airport that doesn’t smell like a hellish bus ride. We’ve already had a hellish bus ride in the skies to get here or we are about to have one, so is it too much to ask for someone in charge to give a flying kangaroo about making the airport a nicer place?
Julie's Rant 