Waiting at some carousels can take an age. Photo / Getty Images
Waiting at some carousels can take an age. Photo / Getty Images
Why does it take longer to get your bags at Auckland's domestic terminal than the international one?
At what moment do you place the call, send the text or book the Uber? This is an as-yet-unsolved airport dilemma: knowing when to let your ride know you'll be bursting through theautomatic doors, wheelie bag in tow, and ready for the car trip home.
It used to be that if it was Auckland's domestic terminal, you'd want your pick-up about five minutes after touchdown. If no friend or family member was there on airport-run duties, you could be fairly safe in booking the Uber as you were walking towards the baggage carousel. It might take a few minutes, but generally bag and ride would arrive at roughly the same time and you'd be good to go.
As for Auckland International, it was accepted wisdom you'd apply the same time estimates as for any international airport anywhere in the world: Add about 40-minutes to the arrival time and that's when you'd be hopping in the taxi, unless of course you were talking about a pre-refurbished LAX which could be anything from 40 minutes to two hours.
Times — quite literally — have changed and not all of it for the worse. I arrived back from Fiji a few weeks ago and I kid you not, from the initial kiss of the plane's wheels on the tarmac to those first rays of Auckland sunshine on my face was a mere 15-minutes. The years of growing pains with the international airport's upgrades are starting to prove very, very worthwhile and everything from the electronic passport technology to the immediacy of bags on the carousel to the biosecurity check couldn't have been smoother.
A few hundred metres away at the domestic terminal and it's a different story. It feels like every flight back to Auckland from other parts of the country I've done in the past year has been met with a painfully long wait for my bag. I have sympathy because I know the domestic terminal is undergoing major changes too and the problems are indicative of a facility operating at (or near) capacity. I've got no doubt things will improve, just as they have at the international.
But right now, amid the pushy throng as I wait for my black bag with my Lego Batman name tag, it's all so interminably dragged out that I have no idea when to book the Uber. A simple solution, you may quite reasonably say, is to delay booking your Uber until you've got your bag, but that denies you the inner high-five of walking out the doors just as your car pulls up. And a life without inner high-fives is hardly a life at all.
Sri Lanka's tourism woes
Almost two months on from the Easter terrorist attacks in Sri Lanka that claimed 258 lives, I've been thinking a lot about that beautiful country. My wife and I holidayed in Sri Lanka just last year and with its combination of beaches, wildlife, history, food and people — what wonderful, welcoming people — it wasn't hard to see why Sri Lanka had so rapidly become such a hot tourist destination.
Sigiriya, Sri Lanka. Photo / Louise Burton
Ten years ago Sri Lanka received around half a million international visitors a year, a number that had swelled to 2.4 million by 2018. Then April 21 happened.
As the dust from that atrocious, barbaric day settles, what now for an industry that provides so much employment and such a huge chunk — estimated to be as high as 11 per cent — of Sri Lanka's total GDP?
Tourist numbers are now expected to drop anything from 25 per cent to 50 per cent and reports on the ground paint the picture of luxury resorts that have gone from 70 per cent occupancy to as little as 10 per cent. It's devastating but if history can teach us warnings we so often fail to heed, it can also give us optimism. Bali is a case in point. The 2002 bombings hammered the tourism industry there, but not permanently. It took a full two years to recover to pre-bombing numbers, but the point is, it did recover. In time, Sri Lanka will too.
Tim Roxborogh hosts Newstalk ZB's Weekend Collective and blogs at RoxboroghReport.com.
