The following is an account of the airport and airborne experiences attendant on my recent excursions to Vanuatu and Timor Leste (East Timor in English). It’s essentially a litany of First World Problems, but I’m doing it as a public service to travellers about what to expect nowadays when dealing with our once-revered national airline.
Vanuatu and Timor Leste will be the 99th and 100th countries I’ve visited. At one stage I had the ambition of visiting every country in the world but there are too many of them and I’m getting too old. I’ve called this trip The Last Gallivant because 100 is a nice round number and I don’t know how much longer I want to put up with the privations and discomforts of travel, particularly air travel, as you will read below.
The story so far…. My friend Alec and I have taken three days to drive from Geelong up the east coast to Brisbane, where he has family business, namely his grandson’s 5th birthday celebrations. From Brisbane I’m going on to Vanuatu and Timor alone (Alec doesn’t share my country-counting obsession) and then home to Tasmania via Darwin and Adelaide, where I’ll be visiting old friends.
August 24, 2025. Sunday morning in Brisbane. I’m flying to Port Vila in Vanuatu on a Qantas flight that leaves at 1020am. Gotta be at the airport 8.20 at least, to check in in person. I tried to check in online yesterday but was unable to because, according to the Qantas app, I booked my tickets through a third party, Expedia.
So why send me both text and email inviting me to check in online, if they know I can’t do it?
Alec is driving me to the airport which is about 15 minutes away. We leave our B n B at 7.30am, we have plenty of time, we should get to the airport well before 8, it’s a delightful calm sunny day, there’s no traffic to speak of and 15 minutes later we are at the airport roundabout where …… the picnic is over! Traffic slows to a crawl and it takes us another 20 minutes just to get to International Departures drop-off about 200m away.
Something has happened at the airport to cause widespread chaos.
These are the things that went wrong, with associated rumours, as gleaned subsequently from fellow disgruntled travellers:
Someone said there’d been a fire alarm earlier, causing a mass evacuation. Someone else said there’d been a computer crash causing the luggage conveyors to stop and the lifts to get stuck. Some people I met later in Port Vila said they got stuck in the lifts.
This is what I observed myself:
The check-in machines weren’t working. At least not for me. I tried a few of them and none would scan my passport. No passport scan, no boarding-pass, no bag-tag.
There were no check-in counters for economy class. None at all. I briefly approached the business class check-in to ask for advice but was shooed away when they saw my lowly Economy status.
I tried to grab the attention of passing staff, but so did dozens and dozens of other passengers similarly unable to use the check-in machines. The crowd swelled by the minute; people were not being processed through to bag-drop and beyond. Occasional harassed-looking staffers whizzed past, shouting over their shoulders that we – that is to say I and a clutch of other anxious and bewildered passengers – should find our own staff consultant. ‘But there aren’t any!’ said I. A demure Japanese girl and a pleasant Indian lady nodded vigorous agreement. ‘There are at least 5 of us on duty’, said one whose attention we had momentarily grabbed before she disappeared into the milling crowd.
A handful of Qantas staff set up a handful of pop-up kiosks with computers and machinery. There were long queues at each one. Could I check in here? It looked like they were only dispensing bag-tags, but in any event the staff abandoned their posts before I could get near them. I eventually came up behind a young female staffer who was, god bless her, sticking to her post at another temporary kiosk, dispensing bag tags to people who appeared to already have boarding-passes. I shouted for her attention.
‘I haven’t even got my boarding-pass yet’, I pleaded. ‘How do I get it?!’ That did the trick. She turned her back on the bag-tag waiters, grabbed my passport, did some fiddling on a computer and within 5 minutes I had my boarding pass and bag tag.
As I queued up to drop my suitcase at the bag-drop, I got chatting to a nice young Sikh man on his way home to India to see his dying mother. This was to be an indefinite stay for obvious reasons; he’d even sold his house in Gladstone (for a profit, he told me – a small mercy). He was just in front of me and when we got to the luggage machine it turned out he thought this was where you checked in! Not that he could be blamed for thinking so. By some miracle there was a free-ranging Qantas bloke there who told him he’d have to go and get his boarding pass first. Good luck with that, I thought. Off he went, crestfallen. I felt guilty for his sake and for that of the other more polite and patient people with whom I’d previously been sharing this ordeal, mindful that I’d only succeeded in obtaining my boarding pass and bag tag by making a nuisance of myself.
From then on it wasn’t too bad as, in contrast to bag-drop and check-in, there were plenty of Qantas people around to shepherd the now hundreds and hundreds of people going through the long zig-zag queues to security and customs. But the glitches hadn’t stopped. The machines at border control were finding problems with a lot of passports, including mine. We unlucky ones had to lose our place in the queue and join another one to have our passports processed manually. I still had plenty of time for my flight but the young couple behind me could see from the overhead screen that their plane was already boarding. I let them go ahead of me, which might have given them three minutes.
All fellow-sufferers to whom I spoke at various times throughout the proceedings swore they’d never seen such numbers or such chaos at Brisbane airport before. When I finally got through to the departure lounge I had time for a coffee and a sandwich in a cafe so crowded an older kiwi lady asked to share my table. She reported the same story: been visiting her kids in Brisbane for years, never seen the like.
I supposed that was a good sign, in that it might have been a one-off bad day. Maybe things would improve by the time I next had to go through Brisbane airport.
****
Nevertheless, over the next few nights in Vanuatu I lay awake at night dreading my Brisbane-Darwin-Dili flight four days later on Thursday August 28. A domestic flight with an international connection. With an even earlier start – 8.20 am. What if there’s the same hassle with check-in? What if my luggage doesn’t make the transfer? There’s no number to call in the several generic emails Qantas sends in advance of a flight, and no help on the Qantas website.
There was however in one of those emails an invitation to upgrade to business class. I would normally not indulge myself in such a luxury, not for a flight less than 5 hours, at least.
26/8. After another anxious night I decide to put in an offer for that upgrade to business class, for the sole purpose of being able to talk to a human being when inevitably I can’t check in online and my passport won’t scan for me or my very modest suitcase at Brisbane airport. If my suitcase doesn’t make the changeover at Darwin for the Dili flight, I’ll be without it for 2 out of my three days, because Qantas only flies to Dili three days a week.
***
I will never forget the horror of arriving in Iceland without my suitcase a couple of years ago. It had been left behind during a short stopover in Schiphol. I had no toiletries whatsoever, no warm clothes, no iPad…. And there was nothing in the hotel room and no shops open! I did have my iphone and a charger, so I was able to grumble to Icelandair who were able to offer no comfort apart from a T-shirt and a small plastic comb to tide me over…. But that’s another story, another Travel Horror.
****
27.8. This morning an email from Qantas: your upgrade bid has been successful. I’m mightily relieved. It’s costing me an extra $660 but I had to do it or lose my sanity from anxiety.
28.8 Still haunted by the Iceland Horror, I’ve overpacked my backpack to include all devices, chargers, toiletries and a change of clothes because I have no confidence my suitcase will make the transfer tomorrow, even if I do. My backpack is now heavier than my suitcase.
***
Now I must go back a few days to begin the tale of the Worst Horror.
The Qantas website had told me I would have to check in at the International terminal, then go to the Domestic terminal 4 km away, because it was an international flight on the one ticket (Brisbane-Dili) even though the first leg was domestic (Brisbane-Darwin).
This didn’t seem right. Surely it was more likely that I would check in self and bag at Domestic, then collect bag at Darwin and check-in self and bag anew for the international leg to Dili. In the week leading up to this flight I tried to confirm the procedure in every way I could think of: I interrogated the Qantas website, phrasing the question in different ways in case I had misunderstood, likewise asking Google’s AI Co-Pilot to interpret the Qantas website for me. No matter which way I checked and queried – up, down, sideways – and no matter how or where I enquired, I got the same answer: Yes, they will check you in for both legs at Brisbane International, check your suitcase through the whole way, then you will have to get yourself to the domestic terminal to board the flight.
(There is of course no phone number to call to octuple-check, and the Qantas chat bot didn’t even understand the question.)
I ceased doubting – almost – when while still in Brisbane and before I left for Vanuatu I asked my friend’s son, a Jetstar pilot based in Brisbane, if that was the way it worked and he said probably.
The night I flew back from Port Vila – August 27 – I stayed at the Ibis airport hotel which was 20 minutes walk from the domestic terminal and which I’d managed to find despite there being no signposting at all to get you through the maze of ramps and bridges and walkways and lifts and escalators to get there. I had to accost 4 different strangers to find my way. I know that’s Yet Another Story, but it adds to my evolving theory that, to paraphrase Sartre, Hell is Modern Travel.
So, back to the day of the flight – August 28th.
Even with my suitcase and check-in anxiety somewhat alleviated by my business class status I resolved to get up super-early…just in case.
So out of bed at 5, out the hotel door at 6, onto the $8 hotel shuttle bus and off to the international terminal a 10 minute drive away. At the Qantas end there a free-ranging staffer took a look at my digital ticket and said ‘this is a domestic flight; you have to go to the domestic terminal.’
I remonstrated. I protested. ‘But the website told me half a dozen times to come HERE to the international terminal!’
She led me wailing and spluttering over to the business counter where an older uniformed chap confirmed she was right; I would have to check in self and bag at the domestic terminal. In vain did I cite my manifold attempts to check I had the right advice from Qantas. He counselled a deep breath, a bus ride to the domestic terminal, then a nice cup of tea. I have to say, his good-humoured response did reduce my crossness level substantially.
He gave me directions to the terminal shuttle bus pick-up spot: over there, through the door, down the lift and out the front and along a-ways. I only had to consult one stranger – a cleaning lady – to find it. She pointed out a bus waiting about 100m away.
I scurried over at speed, but the bus took off just before I got there, my desperate waving to no avail. A ten-minute wait for the next one. I was starting to get distressed and cross again, because of the time already lost at the airport and also recalling the hours of time and effort wasted trying to get correct basic information from Qantas. There was also that peculiar dull misery that comes over you when you realise you have to go back the way you came.
****
Anyway, I got there in time and thanks to that business class comfort the 4-hour flight to Darwin was even pleasant. Breakfast was very good, I’ll give Qantas that.
It was back to economy for the Dili leg but the two-hour transit at Darwin airport was no hardship, what with the airport itself not busy and the big upstairs International Departure Lounge even less so. There were only 4 other people in it when I got there, and I spent a leisurely 90 minutes chatting to an older couple on the way to visit their daughter. He’d been in the RAAF helping fix up Darwin after Cyclone Tracey. His wife was the one who’d heard about the computer crash in Brisbane last Sunday, a mishap that seems to have been covered up somehow, as I searched high and low online but in vain for any reference to the ensuing chaos.
The daughter was working as a doctor in Timor Leste with Australian Volunteers Abroad. Through her they had useful tips about how to navigate the complicated old-fashioned visa entry system, of which the $US30 in cash (I knew about that, having done my homework) was the simplest part and just the start.
But for now the gods were smiling on me. The flight to Dili was a delight. There were only 20 of us on a neat little E-190 jet, I had a window seat to myself in an empty row, there were no unhappy babies or toddlers on board, no obnoxious fellow passengers, I didn’t have to queue for the toilet, the weather was beautiful and we took off and landed on time.
31.8. To recap my major beefs so far:
First, there are no staff to help with check-in and bag-drop when the technology doesn’t work, secondly the website cannot answer simple questions like how do I check in for a 2-leg domestic/international flight, thirdly there is no way to contact Qantas either by phone or email or chatbot to get an answer.
Here is my fourth beef. It’s about Qantas communication.
They send you two emails before every flight. One about 10 days before, telling you to prepare for it. It’s all about bag limits and dangerous goods and getting to the airport on time and not forgetting your passport: stuff that gets mentioned in every single communication since the day you booked the flight.
Then you get the email inviting you to bid for an upgrade.
Then a couple of days before the flight comes the one that says ‘time to check in’.
You get the same messages by text. With several Qantas flights in fairly quick succession over three or four weeks, all my inboxes were clogged with useless information.
Useless? For a start, as previously whinged about, the ‘check-in now’ emails (and texts) don’t always let you check in, and they don’t tell you anything you really would like to know.
Take today’s flight. ‘Prepare for your flight from Dili to Darwin’, said the email. So they know where I’m going, and they know where from. There was the usual generic stuff about bag limits and dangerous goods and blah blah but nothing at all about Dili airport…..
….where there are no signs to indicate – anything at all, really. There was a big crowd of people outside a low building, and when I saw what looked like a rough queue of people disappearing slowly into a narrow dark doorway I joined it. This was bag-drop, where they looked at my paper ticket and took my bag. But what now? I hadn’t checked in yet and had no boarding pass. There was no passage further on and we prospective travellers ended up back outside the terminal building milling around an open area in front of it. There were a few crappy chairs, all occupied, but it was at least under cover, out of the sun.
So, do I just stand here then and wait for something to happen?
I’d read online that there was a VIP lounge I could pay to go into, and I quizzed a few people about where it might be or where I could get drinks and food. Nobody seemed to know, or even to speak English, but one uniformed bloke opened an elasticized barrier and ushered me out past the covered area, pointing around the side of the building. There I found a couple of hot and grimy takeaway ‘cafes’ that didn’t have EFTPOS, making them useless to me as I had no cash left. I went back ‘inside’ (ie under cover and behind the elasticized barrier) and asked again: Where is the departure lounge? Where do I check in? Eventually a uniformed fellow managed by means of nods and gestures and repeated use of the word ‘bus’ to indicate that I should stand here and wait. Sure enough a mini bus turned up shortly after and they squeezed 12 of us into an 11-seater which took us to the departure terminal around the corner about 500m away.
Security and screening went smoothly, and they spoke English, but it would have been helpful to know about the bus. It would also have been helpful to know that contrary to what you read online there is no VIP lounge and no wifi at Dili airport.
Nor is there EFTPOS. I hadn’t even bothered to ask Google about this because, you know, this is an AIRPORT so of course there’ll be EFTPOS. But no EFTPOS, and no ATM. And here’s me giving away my last greenback (the $US is the official currency) to the hotel driver who brought me to the airport.
I was by now mightily hungry, having that morning made the 584 step ascent of the headland upon which stands Cristo Rei, a 250 metre statue of Christ. (More about that under my travel pages.)
There was food and drink tantalisingly on display (albeit in vending machines) in the departure hall, but they might as well have been on the moon for cashless moi.
Just as well the 3.30 flight wasn’t delayed and just as well I nicked a roll and some cheese from the hotel brekky room, and just as well I kept some of the peanuts that came with every meal at the nice Chinese restaurant near my Dili hotel.
2/9 The overseas component of the Last Gallivant is over, and today I’m flying from Darwin to Adelaide, the 6th and last Qantas flight of this round of travel.
In a rare case of digital benevolence, for once I was able to check in online on my phone the day before AND get my boarding pass.
So I headed straight for bag drop at the airport. A row of machines again, with a sign above saying ‘All Airlines Bag Drop’. I hit the Qantas sign on the machine screen and put my bag on the conveyor belt. ‘Please scan your boarding pass’, the machine said. I did that and of course the machine said ‘I can’t read this, go and find a customer service officer.’ Here we go again.
I joined a queue of people waiting to have their carry-on baggage weighed, by the only Qantas employee I could see. Was this the right queue? There didn’t seem to be any other options, and no one else to ask. When I got to the head of the queue I told the woman I’d checked in but the bag drop machine wouldn’t read my boarding pass.
‘You’ve got to get your bag tag first,’ she said.
‘But I tried that and the machine would give me one’, I said.
‘No’, she said, ‘you’ve got to get it HERE’.
‘Here’ was exactly the same type of machine I’d tried before. I half got through asking why the other ones didn’t work when she snapped at me again: ‘You’ve got to get it HERE!’
So she scanned my boarding pass on that identical machine and out came my bag tag, which she wrapped around my suitcase handle as they do.
I went over to the conveyor belt again, put my bag on it and my boarding pass scanned. Hooray. But the bag stayed put and ominous signs came up on the screen. Just then a guardian angel materialised in the form of a nice Qantas bloke who explained that my bag tag wasn’t displayed in the correct way for its barcode to be read. He fixed it, saying I should have put it on the side handle, not the top one, so the conveyor belt scanner could read its barcode. Ahh, I see. So why didn’t the snappy woman get that right, then?
This helpful gentleman wasn’t too busy so I asked him why there weren’t signs up to tell us how to do bag-tagging and bag-drop, if we are expected to do it ourselves from now on.
‘You get rid of all the check-in staff but don’t explain how to use the machines properly’, I said. He nodded sympathetically. I started to elaborate further on my gruelling ordeal at Brisbane airport the other day when he interrupted to shake his head and said ‘I know. Brisbane airport is in a terrible state; I went through there myself a few days ago.’ I could have kissed him.
He continued: ‘It’s the airports that are insisting on this automation; it’s not our doing.’ Well, well, well. That puts a different light on things. It doesn’t let Qantas off the hook, but it does mollify me considerably to have one of the frontline workers offer both commiseration and explanation. I thanked him profusely.
The importance of that human factor again!
****
Qantas made a record profit last financial year despite being fined $90m for selling tickets for non-existent flights and sacking workers during the Covid lockdown. What did they do with that profit? Spent it on PR telling us how they’ve changed their ways, by the looks. Certainly not on improving their IT systems or employing more badly-needed staff.
You’ll recall that most of the problems I’ve reported were down to a combination of tech/digital/AI failings and a lack of staff to deal with them.
With all 6 flights, not once did the airport machines act as they were supposed to, whether it was for check-in scans, bag-tag scans, boarding pass scans or passport scan on arrival. Not once.
The only time things went smoothly and pleasantly was the flight from Darwin to Dili, when all that difficult stuff came with the first leg.
Wouldn’t you know it was the only one Qantas sent me a feedback form for. Here’s me with a swag of gripes to offload, but no reason to badmouth them on this ONE occasion!
But perhaps I’m underrating their IT. Maybe their AI knew all along about my and that’s why they only asked about that flight?