I know this isn't Air NZ specific but IMHO it really is the best place to discuss the topic.

I flew back from Oasis in Sydney on Sun 9th and it took close to 30 mins to clear biosecurity screening at AKL at 7pm despite being carry on only. My international travel has been pretty limited this year due to my workload, so I've only had one arrival into AKL in May, when I landed from HKG at around 10am ish on a Saturday.

As I'm not a regular through AKL it had me wondering how common these wait times are, but more importantly what the green express lane is really trying to achieve now.

When it was introduced the idea was to cut wait times for those who had completed an online NZTD and had nothing to declare. It seems right now that all it's doing is increasing wait times and forcing passengers to queue twice rather than once.

Anybody who is a regular through AKL will know that at the bottom of the escalator after immigration there is now an "express lane" queue to the left where you pass behind the escalator and finally get to a desk where your passport is scanned and assuming your declaration and travel history fits with the express lane requirements your passport gets some yellow tape with EL written on it in a marker pen. You're now in the baggage hall so can claim your bags if you have any, and then proceed to the green express lane exit where you will join another queue for a desk where the EL sticker is crossed with a marker pen (to prevent reuse) and you then join a queue for inspection by a sniffer dog.

For my May arrival and my 3-4 arrivals last year this process was very quick and took me literally 7-8 mins tops on every occasion from walking down the escalator to exiting landside into the terminal.

I realise my arrival time on the Sunday was at a peak time and that the airport was relatively busy but I'm curious what wait times are like at other times of the day. Is 30 mins the new norm? Does it get worse?

It would seem that the vast majority of passengers now use the NZTD app and more significantly that bringing in prepackaged food from a supermarket such as chocolate, snacks, nuts etc now entitles you to proceed through the green channel. On the paper forms any form of food was a "something to declare" item which technically meant you were supposed to use the red channel. On this basis it would seem that the vast majority of arrivals are now eligible to use the green channel, whereas previously more would have been in the red channel.

The process of firstly queuing at the bottom of the escalator and then having to queue once again to exit the baggage hall behind the very same people you've just been queuing behind seems broken. Prior to these changes you simply had a green and red channel and queued once, got assessed by a human and then sent to either the dog or baggage xray depending on your risk profile.

It really seems now that something that was designed to speed up a process is actually just making it slower due to the vast majority of passengers all using the express lane. Had I simply exited into the baggage hall to the right at the bottom of the escalator I could have proceeded directly to the green channel at the end of the baggage hall where there were no queues at all, been assessed by a human, then been screened by the same dog. Unless there was a queue hiding somewhere that I didn't see I'm picking I would have been out of there in under 5 mins rather than 30 mins.

Have others for any other observations or insights into this process? To me it just seems broken... And my tip of the day is to look left at the bottom of the escalator for queues, and if there are any queues just proceed right out of the door into the baggage hall and then exit via the old green channel.

The new process at WLG seems to be creating problems as well. For those who know the airport they moved the desks to the start of the duty free store right after the egate machines. Because of the time this was taking the queues slowed down people moving through the egate machines so they've needed to move these all back. On all my arrivals into WLG this year I've then been given an express card and then walked to the baggage hall to find the green lane is closed (no dog on duty) and then have to go through the other channel for mandatory bag xray. Considering most arrivals at WLG never seem to have a dog on duty (I haven't seen one for years) I'm kinda stumped as to the purpose of having a process that is very rarely used. All it does it confuse people who get to the exit with a card for the green lane to find it is closed off.