Airport parking is such sweet sorrow - if you don't use your doughnut

This is your challenge, if you choose to accept it. Against the clock you must race to collect loved ones from Sydney Airport. Drive through the boom gates, dodge luggage trolleys and find a park. Catch a lift to the terminal, decipher the details on the arrivals screen and fight your way past a lacrosse team returning from the world championships. Work out whether there really is any difference between exits C and D, greet your loved ones, haul their bags out onto the faux indigenous paving out the front, stick your credit card into the parking ticket machine, throw the bags in the car and zoom off.

This is a game show never broadcast, though played in earnest, with money at stake, every day of the week at Mascot. The challenge is to complete the sequence in less than half an hour. If you take 31 minutes, you will be charged $15. If you take 29 minutes you'll still pay $7. But small mercies, right?

Everyone knows that airport parking is expensive, but it has become so outrageous that, this time last year, the Federal Government asked the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to monitor parking costs at major airports around Australia because it is all so suss.

Sure enough, when the commission reported back last week, it confirmed what we all know, and that Sydney Airport is the worst. The five airports monitored collected a total of $244 million in parking fees in the 2007-08 financial year. Coming down on the airports like a gram of bricks, the commission reported: "Although not conclusive, the ACCC considers that some results are consistent with airports having a monopoly position".

The commission notes its role does not extend to setting airport parking prices or approving them. So the most airport operators have to fear is they might be viciously watched and mercilessly commented upon. How scary.

Surely the Government, though, would be justified in doing something about it. Especially when you consider Sydney Airport parking costs are not only outrageous compared to other cities here, they are outrageous compared to much more expensive cities overseas. When we collect people from our airport, we pay more than we would in London or New York. While Sydney charges $15, Heathrow lists its short-term parking costs as #4.10 ($8.50) for up to an hour and New York's Kennedy Airport charges $US6 ($8.45). Finally, the Australian tourism industry can boast about something world-class.

The trouble with a monopoly like Sydney Airport is we cannot protest by taking our custom elsewhere. There isn't another airport. We have to wait for the Government or the consumer watchdog to act. But in the meantime, we can still fight the system, man, by becoming one of those friend-greeting, relative-collecting hippies who has tuned in, turned on and dropped out of the airport parking mainstream.

Though it feels as horrid as revealing directions to a secluded waterfall in a backpacker guide book, I want to let you in on a little secret not everyone knows about. Turn left just before the domestic terminal and you will find the havens of Krispy Kreme Doughnuts and McDonald's. I stopped by there on Wednesday for strawberry flavoured carbohydrates and sure enough, as always, the car parks - the free car parks! - were busier than the shops themselves. Not surprising, given that Krispy Kreme offers a full hour of parking free, while McDonald's offers half an hour free. For customers only, mind, but still a great place to lie in wait before doing a quick drive-by at the domestic terminal.

On those glorious slabs of unpoliced concrete, drivers wait and listen to the radio, or stretch their legs and send text messages. All they have to do is await a call from the person they are collecting, then they can whiz past the terminal and grab them so quick that they can't be fined for blocking traffic.

The exact same conscientious objectors to paid parking, I bet, who know to park on Parramatta Road at exactly 10.01am, when it ceases being a clearway and who monopolise loading zones as soon as it hits 5.59pm. Because when parking gets expensive, cheapskates go maverick.

Airport car crunch - Traveller