Melbourne airport top five in the world…
February 29th, 2008 by Tiffany Miller
Melbourne Airport has recently been named as one of the world’s top five for passenger service. It came in behind Kuala Lumpur, San Diego, Zurich and Vancouver.
Funny, then, that I had two of my worst ever travel experiences there. When I flew in a couple of weeks ago from Brisbane, I was walking to the baggage claim when all of a sudden the entire airport (or at least the terminal I was in) lost power. It was a mere ten seconds before they came back on, but apparently it was enough to cause an hour-long delay for our baggage to come in. That was not fun, especially in light of the fact that I had two friends who I hadn’t seen in years waiting outside the terminal for me.
I went back a few days later to catch a flight to New Zealand. When I arrived at the counter without my onward ticket printed out (oops…) the woman told me to go over to the Hilton Hotel to print it. Not being able to leave my bag behind their little counter, I hauled about 30 kilos of stuff over to the hotel only to find that their computers were down. Back to the counter, directed to the (closed) Emirates offices, back to the counter, directed to (closed) internet cafe, finally found internet which I needed coins for and three different businesses in the vicinity would not give me change, emailed document to JetStar manager, ran to JetStar counter at other end of airport to pick it up, back to counter just in time to check in before closing. Phew…
So I get to the gate and hear the loudspeaker switch on. “Attention ladies and gentlemen, due to some technical difficulties there will be a departure delay for flight numbe……”
Top five, eh? In all fairness, it may have just been that few hours I was there. I have had the tendency toward bad travel luck in the past two weeks… But at the time, I probably would have rated it somewhere in the 3,000th-4,000th bracket, especially thinking back to the wonderful world of Vancouver and Zurich Airports, which offer quite a bit more than good duty-free shops and Starbucks.
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