docbert

Arrived in SYD Intl this morning from SFO, connecting to the Gold Coast on Virgin.

Arrivals was insanely busy - probably as busy as I've ever seen it, even in the before-times. Spoke to one of the staff who said it's been that way for much of the past week. In fairness we were probably the last flight in from the 6-7am peak period so the worst time to land. My priority-tagged bag (well, box) took about 40-45 minutes to come out, and based on the number of people waiting that was clearly early on in the bags. (I don't know how early it was as I was jujmping between the normal belt and the oversized as I wasn't sure where it was going to come out - ended up being the normal belt)

The Virgin transfer desk is open, but incredibly poorly signposted. I only saw 2 signs for it, and you'd only see them if you were already knew where it was and were already headed towards it. (It's in the same location it's always been - the opposite end of the terminal from the QF one - turn left after customs and keep walking). As a result, the vast majority of the people on the T-bus between terminals had bags with them (bags that were already tagged for their final destination on VA flights!), as they clearly didn't know the transfer desk existed. This slowed the loading of the buses significantly.

Security in T2 (Virgin) was moderately busy, but no more than 10 minutes to get through. (I didn't even look at the check-in area so can't comment on that)

All up from landing to being in the Virgin lounge was about 1 hour 40 minutes.

Transferring from UA to VA under their new partnership worked fine. UA issued boarding passes and tagged my 'bag' (box) all the way through. Bag drop at VA desk was a little slow as I had to also check my roller-board bag, so I went from 1 checked bag on the first leg to 2 on the second. (I knew I was going to have to do this due to VA's carryon limits, but decided to carry it on for the first leg anyway).