Passengers who have missed connections or arrived extra early for morning flights have made many complaints about being kicked out and forced to wait on the street. Entrepreneur and Planet Ark co-founder Jon Dee said he had a 6am flight to Armenia via Dubai on Monday morning. He decided to get the last train from his Katoomba home on Sunday night and arrived at the airport just after midnight.
He said hotels were booked out or charging inflated prices due to Taylor Swift performing in Sydney. He said he planned to relax in the airport until it was time to check in at 3am but was "amazed" to be told by a security guard to leave the premises.
"When I went outside, I met this German lady who had a six-month-old baby, and she had to wait for two-and-a-half hours outside," Mr. Dee told ABC Radio Sydney.
Like him, she had assumed there would be somewhere to wait even if their flight wasn't leaving until 6am. "I travel around the world, all the major international airports, the terminals themselves are open 24 hours a day even if they're not allowed to fly 24 hours," Mr Dee said.
"That way, if you do arrive there, or if you're stuck, or the plane breaks down, there's some way you can get a coffee, somewhere you can go to the toilet, somewhere you can relax."
Mr. Dee said it was "embarrassing".
"We are the main entry point for most people coming to Australia and it's ridiculous that we're kicking people out on the street. "Imagine if it had been a winter's night with rain, all of those passengers would have got wet, I think it's time for it to become a 24-hour airport."
A spokesperson for Sydney Airport said the terminals closed to the public overnight for security reasons. "It's due to the government-mandated curfew from 11pm to 6am," they said. "However, we emphasise a commonsense approach with our security contractor particularly around situations involving vulnerable people.
"We will follow this up to make sure our teams meet expectations around customer service and communication in the future." Mary Loonam said she had a similar experience when she and her friend arrived early for their 6am flight to Eastern Europe.
"I've got this friend who has to be early for everything, so we arrived at the airport by taxi and of course nothing was open," she said. "And she suffers from quite a bad back that friend of mine and there was no way for her to sit or anything.
"She ended up sitting on a suitcase."
Karen Burgess said she arrived at the airport at 2am to farewell her son who was travelling to the United Kingdom. "There were probably about 20 to 30 people there … I just thought it was hysterical, I had my nose pressed to the window looking at the guy polishing the floor."
Aviation expert and Aviation Projects managing director, Keith Tonkin, said he was not surprised Sydney Airport was closed for a few hours given the flight curfew.
He said there would be a "significant cost" to open the terminal facilities for a relatively small number of people who would need them at those times. "It is unlikely that they would have had any airline staff and other staff that would want to be there necessarily, during those times if there was no scheduled operation," Mr. Tonkin said.
He suggested the airport consider providing some basic shelter to accommodate those people who were extra early for flights or have had their plans disrupted leaving them stranded. He said it was important to make the airport experience as smooth as possible.
"It's the gateway, the major gateway to Sydney in Australia for a lot of international travellers, and their first or their last impression can make a really big difference about how they perceive the place and how they reflect their experience to others," he said.
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