It’s a flying rip off

Something strange happened at Sydney Airport the other day. I went to pick up a friend from the domestic terminal and was shocked to find I wasn’t stung for parking. Since September last year the airport has been providing 10-minute free parking in a new 51-space car park outside Terminal 2, easily accessible for domestic passengers.

This is great news and airport management should be commended. There’s no reason the public should be pillaged for the right to pull over, pick someone up and drive away.

But I fell to Earth a week later when I returned to Sydney from overseas and tried to work out a way to get picked up without my ride having to pay for the privilege.

There’s no public pick-up area in the international terminal. They did away with it in the ‘90s, and if you get cute and pick someone up from the drop-off area you risk an instant $80 fine.

I thought of going to the domestic terminal and using the pick up area there, but the train from international to domestic costs $5 and the bus trip $5.50. Walking is not an option as it’s a three-kilometre walk from the airport before you reach a suburban street where anybody can pick you up legally.

An airport spokesperson told me the reason for not having a public pick-up area in the international terminal is to avoid congestion – all those people and all those bags could create confusion – and mumbled something about terrorists.

But more than two thirds of the airport’s 33 million passengers each year are domestic passengers and the free public pick-up in the domestic terminal is working just fine.

For those who park, the fee structure is a rort. The minimum is 30 minutes at a cost of $7; stay 31 minutes and the charge jumps to $14. In this age of computers, is there no way the system could charge in one-minute increments? There is no rationale that justifies charging in $7 blocks, except that we all keep paying.

Sydney Airport’s parking fees are double what you would pay at Heathrow, one of the busiest airports in the world. An airport spokesman told me this is because the airport is closer to the CBD (does this make any sense at all?) and added: “Car parking is a commercial operation and rates are determined after undertaking a market assessment.”

But when you have a complete monopoly, you are the market and the only assessment to be made is how much you can screw people for before competition regulators get involved.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission had this to say in a 2009 report about Australia’s airports: “The indications are that car parking prices likely reflect an element of monopoly rent … the ACCC has observed that some airports may affect the cost or convenience of potential alternatives to on-airport parking.”

Translation: not only are consumers being fleeced by airport parking prices, airports are also doing what they can to make alternatives unattractive.

We tend to accept that airports exist in an alternative dimension where sandwiches cost $10 and parking costs more each year.

As I gave in to the inevitable and paid for my parking, I bumped into Elizabeth, a fellow victim, and asked how she felt about paying $7 to park for 15 minutes.

“I think it’s a rip off,” she said “as is everything else at this airport.”
– By Aaron Cook