Melbourne Airport Chauffeur Guide

Which terminal you are actually arriving into

Melbourne Airport has four terminals in one connected precinct. T2 handles international arrivals and departures; T1, T3 and T4 handle domestic services, with T4 operating as the low-cost domestic terminal. They are walkable from one another, but the arrivals halls are distinct, and a chauffeur waiting at the wrong one is the single most common cause of a delayed pickup.

The terminal shown on your booking confirmation should be the terminal on your ticket, not the one you departed from. Codeshare flights are the usual trap: a ticket sold by an international carrier can arrive on a domestic service into T1 or T3. If a flight number changes after booking, send the new one — it is the only detail that reliably determines the meeting point.

Meet and greet versus kerbside collection

Meet and greet means the chauffeur parks, walks into the terminal and waits in the arrivals hall with a name board. You walk out, hand over the luggage and walk to the vehicle together. It costs the parking fee and a few extra minutes, and it is the right choice for international arrivals, first-time visitors, elderly passengers, unaccompanied travellers and anyone arriving after a long-haul flight.

Kerbside collection means the chauffeur waits nearby and moves to a designated pickup zone once you call or message from the terminal door. It is faster and cheaper on a short domestic hop when you have carry-on only and know the airport. Melbourne Airport strictly controls which vehicles may use which zones; because we hold a Landside Driver Authority and Landside Vehicle Authority, collections are made lawfully in the correct zone rather than in a circulating loop.

How flight tracking changes the pickup time

Every inbound airport booking is tracked against the live flight. If the aircraft lands early, the pickup moves earlier; if it lands late, the pickup moves with it, and no one needs to phone ahead to say so. This matters most on the flights people worry about least — a delayed domestic connection at 6am is far more likely to be missed by a fixed-time booking than a long-haul arrival.

Tracking does not remove the need to tell us about a changed flight number. Tracking follows a flight; it cannot follow a passenger who was rebooked onto a different one.

Waiting time, and what is actually free

Our standard is 60 minutes of complimentary waiting from landing on international arrivals, measured from wheels down rather than from the scheduled time. That window is calibrated to a realistic pass through immigration, baggage reclaim and biosecurity, which on a full international arrival can be most of an hour on its own.

Domestic arrivals move faster, so the free window is shorter, and it starts from landing as well. If you are held up — a bag that does not appear, a biosecurity inspection, a long immigration queue — call the operations desk. Waiting time that we know about is a conversation; waiting time we discover after the fact is an invoice line.

Planning a departure from the city

Work backwards from the check-in cut-off, not from the departure time. As a planning range rather than a guarantee, allow 45 to 70 minutes from Melbourne CBD to the airport outside peak hours, and up to 90 minutes in weekday morning or Friday afternoon traffic. Eastern and south-eastern suburbs commonly add 20 to 40 minutes on top of that.

Then add the airline's own requirement: typically two hours before an international departure and one hour before a domestic one, longer if you are checking sporting equipment or travelling with a group. If the resulting pickup time feels uncomfortably early, that is the correct feeling — the cost of arriving early is a coffee, and the cost of arriving late is the fare of a new ticket.

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