Qantas – fewer flights, less choice to London

Introduction

Last week saw Qantas scrap two of their four services on the Kangaroo Route between Australia and London with the removal of QF1 Bangkok to London and QF29 Hong Kong to London. This move will reduce the attractiveness of Qantas on the route, as the airline now offers fewer departure time choices than their major competitors. Additionally, Qantas’ competitive advantage of being able to provide multiple stopover destinations has now been removed.

	Before	After
Flight time choices (Aus-UK)	Daytime departure Late night departure	Daytime departure
Flight time choices (UK-Aus)	Daytime departure Late night departure	Late night departure
Stopover locations	Singapore Hong Kong Bangkok	Singapore(others require BA)

It is very interesting that, despite being the largest player in the Australia to UK market, Qantas and BA collectively offer such a narrow choice of flights.

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‘Fly when you like’ vs ‘Fly when we tell you to’

One acute weakness of the new Qantas schedule is that it actually provides fewer departure options than its key competitors. From Australia, the major competitors offer two choices of departure times; Qantas only offers one as it lacks a night-time departure option:

Out of Sydney, the three daily Qantas/BA services to Singapore (two continue to London) all leave within twenty-five minutes of each other:

It is a similar story leaving London. Starting this week, Qantas/BA will distinguish themselves from their competitors by being the only major player to NOT offer a daylight flight to Australia:

Passengers like having a choice of flight-times. It is interesting that, despite collectively being the largest carrier on the Kangaroo route, Qantas and BA can’t scrape together more than one flight-time option for their customers on a Flagship route.

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One potential solution

Constructing an Australia to UK schedule involves reconciling multiple factors, including:

• Ensuring an appropriate level of capacity is provided
• Commercially attractive flight times (ordinarily, these involve late-night departures or early morning arrivals in order to minimise passengers’ ‘days off’)
• Working around curfews (at both London and Sydney)
• Fleet utilisation
• Coordinating connections at hubs (particularly at Singapore)

One option to improve Qantas’ Kangaroo route offering would be to re-jig the Hong Kong schedules; this would enable a night-time departure out of Australia towards the UK and a daytime departure out of London towards Australia.

Currently, flights from Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth all fly up to Hong Kong during the daytime, have a short layover in Hong Kong, and return to Australia as overnight flights that land back in Australia the following morning. Qantas could change these flights to depart Australia at night – they would arrive into Hong Kong in the following morning and allow passengers to connect to a BA service to London; that flight to London would arrive into Heathrow in the early afternoon. The Qantas aircraft would return from Hong Kong to Australia in the morning (maintaining today’s turnaround times), but be fed by a BA arrival from London. This arrival from London would have left Heathrow at around midday, thereby restoring the daytime departure that had been removed.

A concept schedule is shown below:

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This schedule would see the Hong Kong to London flight be fed by all the major Australian cities. This avoids the mistake they made last time of “starving” their old Hong Hong to London service of feeder flights, thereby contributing to its demise.

Alan Joyce has stated that Qantas is looking to increase capacity into London in a few years’ time; Qantas could therefore extend their Sydney – Hong Kong A380 service to London to provide the Hong Kong to London link discussed above. Qantas A380s currently sit around at London for fifteen hours each day, so operating these legs would allow the A380 fleet to be used a bit more efficiently.

Thanks for reading