Everyone in the airlines game is waiting to see if Alan Joyce will ‘fix’ a broken Qantas product as incoming chief executive officer.
The early evidence from yesterday’s talk fest with tourism leaders in Cairns is not encouraging.
When Joyce was running Jetstar, the airline was reportedly furious with Qantas for axeing non-stop flights to western Japan from Cairns.
But yesterday, to what Jetstar spokesperson Simon Westaway claims was rapturous applause, it announced it had solved the access problem by launching a domestic connection between the Gold Coast to Cairns to link up with new inbound services from Japan.
This is like deciding to serve the Osaka to Sydney market by making it fly there and back via Hobart.
The Japanese tourism market has two entrenched characteristics:
- It loathes the very notion of low cost carriers, and
- It is time poor.
So the Jetstar solution to the near death of Japanese tourism to far north Queensland is to fly what’s left of it right past Cairns, land them at the Gold Coast two hours later, shunt then through the international and domestic security screenings and then fly them north for another two hours on a much smaller and tighter fitting jet.
Welcome to Cairns, former gateway to the tropical north and Great Barrier Reef!
The spokesperson at Jetstar said that the airline had taken some “difficult decisions” and was “investing heavily in its hub strategies at the Gold Coast, Darwin and Perth.”
True but irrelevant. Qantas has already driven part of its Australia-Japan market onto code share partner Japan Airlines and grateful alliance partner Cathay Pacific by downgrading much of its frequency to Jetstar.
The Japan to Cairns via the Gold Coast strategy will result in total flight times at least one third longer than to Hawaii, or three hours longer than to Sydney, with the drudgery of an extra stop on the way.
The extra hours add to costs, especially in fuel, and double the exposure to airport and Australian air traffic control fees.
Qantas is being murdered on the routes to Europe by forcing its customers to transit London Heathrow, with plenty of faster and cheaper flights being offered by the competition over Bangkok, Singapore, Hong Kong and Dubai.
Alan Joyce must know this. Why would he endorse this failed strategy in relation to flights to Cairns?
In the Crikey blog Plane Talking today, US regulator the FAA reveals the Lessons Learned from 11 of the worst airliner crashes of all time.
There is no doubt at all that Qantas has completely lost the plot. That is a given. The thing that always amuses me – as a very long term Japan watcher – is that the Japanese didn’t ever want to go to Cairns in the first place. It was foist upon them as an expedient when Qantas devised – as always purely for their own profit motives – to make that rather ghastly and unappealing city on the estuarine mud flats the “hub” for Japan flights. It was all sold with wonderful Ken Done artworks that had koalas lolling under colorful beach umbrellas on white sandy beaches next to aqua rolling surf. But when the poor old Japanese got off the plane after a long, hard night in economy class and went for a bit of a wander, all they could see (apart from the duty free shops run by Japanese owners – which they were frogmarched to in any case) was mud flats, mangroves and muddy brown water. And warning not to go near the water because of crocodiles and stingers!! Cairns was totally manufactured for Qantas’s own operational convenience purposes, NOT at all for reasons that had anything to do with what the Japanese actually WANTED to see of Australia. And as far as I can see, the move to the Gold Coast, rather than Brisbane, smacks of even more of the same.
Everywhere else in the world the Japanese are going for history, culture, antiquity, etc. (I just spent a week in Venice and was stunned by the numbers of Japanese there), but good old Qantas still thinks they wet their pants over casinos, dolphin parks (even Japan now has them, in addition to including the stars of the shows on restaurant menus) and ultra-expensive duty free shopping. I gave up flying Qantas to Japan long ago. The sooner everyone else does, the better (Cathay, via HK, by the way, is a great alternative!).
Qantas has completely lost the plot. It no longer has any interest in customer service , greed and money now reigns supreme. So much for the National carrier, Australian for Australians? NOT
This should come as no surprise. as dixon’s ‘mini me’, joyce is a cost cutter. rather like schools, hospitals and the like, CEO’s find that the industry would work really well except for the dreaded customer who ruins it all. qf have made it quite clear by sidelining borghetti, getting rid of gregg, hiring joyce who has bought with him the cfo of jetstar that it wants cheap….everything. just watch those executive salaries rise and bonuses inflate while joyce trashes the company. by the time anyone realizes he will be well gone witht he golden parachute.
just one more thiong. given the econmic meltdown, how would qf be now wiyth the likes of allco as an owner in th eproposed buyout. thanks geoff for the promoting of that debacle!