Thursday 23 October 2025

By Scott Charlton, CEO, Sydney Airport

When you arrive in Sydney, your first impression of Australia is made at the border. Every day, tens of thousands of people flow through our international terminal - visitors, returning Australians, and business travellers - and how seamless that experience is says a lot about our country.

In the decade ahead, we expect the process of crossing a border to look a lot different to today. Instead of lining up for passport checks or filling out paper cards, passengers could move through a system of biometric eGates with arrival information submitted online in advance. It's a shift that will make international travel faster, safer and more welcoming - all while improving border security. Using technology to automate lower value work will free up highly trained Australian Border Force (ABF) teams to focus on high-risk areas.

Across the world, airports are embracing technology to make border processing more frictionless. The technology exists today - face recognition, digital travel credentials, AI-driven pre-screening - and it's moving quickly. The challenge for Australia is to move just as fast.

We see a future where passengers complete identity verification before boarding their flight and, on arrival, simply walk through biometric eGates. For countries that embrace this approach, the rewards are huge: More flights, more tourism, more trade and more jobs.

At Sydney Airport, our preliminary draft Master Plan 2045 forecasts a future where we welcome 72 million passengers a year, contribute $70bn to the national economy, and support over 105,000 direct jobs. To achieve that, our border systems need to keep pace with the growth that's coming.

We're proud of the strong partnership we've built with the ABF and government agencies to make this future a reality. In the past six months, we've installed eight new ABF SmartGate kiosks at our international terminal, boosting inbound processing capacity by 640 passengers an hour. Together we'll deliver a total of 40 new kiosks, significantly speeding up processing and improving the arrival experience.

We've also worked with ABF to consolidate kiosks into central clusters, easing congestion and cutting processing times. In parallel, Qantas and ABF have been trialling digital passenger cards on select flights from New Zealand and it's been a hit with passengers.

And on flights to the US, we've partnered with American Airlines, United, and US Customs and Border Protection to test remote baggage screening, allowing eligible passengers to skip rechecking their bags in the US. On the Sydney-San Francisco route, passengers have saved 45 minutes in connection time.

These developments show what's possible when airports, airlines and government agencies work together. When we share a clear goal - a worldclass border experience - we can make real change.

This article first appeared in The Daily Telegraph on Thursday 23 October.