Travel Post 1 - It's hard getting it right end to end

I am currently travelling on a family holiday doing an around the world trip. On the first leg we left Australia travelling to Paris via Singapore. After going through customs I bought a nice bottle of red wine for a friend we were catching up with for dinner. I bought this after customs because as you probably know you can only bring 100ml of liquid with you. As I was only transiting in Singapore and not going through customs and back again I figured it would be fine.

Unfortunately this wasn't the case. Going to the boarding gate at Singapore we had to go through another metal detector and at this point they took the bottle off me. Apprently you can buy duty free drink at Singapore airport and they put it into a sealed plastic bag but because our plastic bag wasn't selaed we had to hand it in. The bottle itself was sealed but somehow a sealed plastic bag was considered the level of protection required.

It is still early in the days of this liquid restrictions on flights and I think over time more reasonable rules will apply but for now there is no end to end thinking. For example Singapore do not trust the Australian process to make sure the bottle of wine was brought onto the plane after customers. And Australia hasn't checked the requirements of travellers going through other airports so that they would also provide a sealed plastic bag.

Then again it is hard enough getting end to end processes right within a single compnay let alone across multiple countries.

Next time I won't be buying any more wine in duty free!