Melbourne Airport Wait Zone

Plane just about visible taking off.

Picked my dad up at the airport. In previous times when picking him up I'd park opposite the airport and wait for him, but last time he complained about how much the parking was (even though I said it had already been paid), so this time I thought I'd take advantage of the wait zone car park (also referred to as the "Ring & Ride" or "Airport Wait Parking")

Arriving and turning off on Exit 18 of the Tullamarine Freeway onto Mercer Drive, I didn't immediately want to turn into the waiting zone car park, so continued to the roundabout at the intersection of Mercer Drive and Airport Drive, then turned left onto Airport Drive and went down to the BP which is a short drive down from the Wait Zone on the corner of Airport Drive and Link Road (address: 182-184 Airport Drive, Melbourne Airport)

It's not really on any aerial maps, it seems to have been completed in late 2020. It's viewable on Google Street View and Apple Maps' Look Around. But not their aerial from above offerings. Bing Maps does show it.

I didn't need fuel, just wanted to get a drink, there's a Maccas there as well.

Depending on where you park, wanting to get back to the waiting zone car park will involve a U-turn by going some distance along Airport Drive to the Sharps Road intersection and doing a U-turn there.

Bing Maps helpfully has arrows showing you how to exit. Source.

If instead you leave via the truck parking area, you can exit and turn left onto Watson Drive and turn left onto Link Road, and then turn right back onto Airport Drive. Then you need to do a U-turn at the Mercer Drive / Airport Drive roundabout that you previously turned left at. 

This is because Mercer Drive is a one way road, coming off the freeway, so you have to access the wait zone car park from Airport Drive.

Driving into the wait zone car park is a little...not confusing, but there's a ticket machine, but the boom gate was up and the screen just said "Free Passage" with a smiley face emoji.

So I drove in and parked. While I was parked there I did see a few people driving in and also being confused by the parking machine / lack of the boom gate being down. I guess you don’t expect it to be free immediately. The Melbourne Airport website does say it’s free for 30 minutes, then from 30 minutes to an hour it’s $4. Anything beyond that is charged at the regular parking rate. 

At least that’s what the website says, but I know I was there for more than 40 minutes and didn’t need to pay anything. 

There is very little shade, there’s one or two trees that hang over the car park, but they’re small ones. I saw some people put their windscreen sun protection up to keep the heat out. 

You have the choice of looking out to the other car parks or out into grassland.

It’s surprisingly quiet there, especially considering it’s right next to the airport.

I got out of my ute and had a wander around, there’s not much.

Information board.

There are two bins, they’re unlabelled but there’s looks like there’s one for rubbish and one for recycling, when I dropped my empty can of V into one it sounded like it was the only thing that was in the bin.

There’s a pay station for presumedly when the ticket machine / boom gate is working.

There’s a mid-sized screen showing the arrivals of flights which is almost impossible to view with the sun beating on it.

And there’s an information board of where to go when you leave the waiting zone.

There is no grass around, it’s all compacted sand footpaths. That has not stopped some people letting their dogs shit on the side, I saw two piles that had not been cleared up by their owners (at least I hope it was dogs). 

Incidentally there are no toilets at this car park.

Exit and Entrance.

Then as I readied to leave I did half worry that the boom gate may go down as you approached, as the parking opposite the airport is done via credit card and reading your number plate, and thought they might have applied a similar process here. But it seemed not. (I had tried to watch people leave, but they seemed to not encounter anything like this)

So I just drove out and headed for the arrivals parking area.

The “Public pick up” was not amazing. Everyone is impatient, while in theory you should be able to drive up and easily park as you do at drop off at the terminal, in practice people are parallel parking. This results in more impatience, and people speeding in right at the 10 km/h speed limit and then getting annoyed by everyone and tooting their horns in impatience. There is a 1 minute limit for pickup.