Tiger’s second announcement of new Sydney flights in two days underlines the pressure the Singapore Airlines controlled low fare airline is applying to the high fare Qantas Cityflyer operation.

Yes. Cityflyer. Not low fare Jetstar, nor middle market Virgin Blue, but high fare Qantas, and especially its inter capital Cityflyers.

Today Tiger’s touch up is the doubling of services between the Gold Coast and Sydney from early February following yesterday’s announcement of entering the route in December.

And while the Cityflyer product doesn’t serve the Gold Coast, the effects of Tiger’s increased presence in Sydney include further dilution of the relevance of the high fare and high cost Qantas product on a network wide basis.

Tiger set about its Sydney centric assault on the Qantas domestic network early in July when it entered the Sydney-Melbourne route with up to four daily returns. It will have up to the 13 return services daily out of Sydney by mid February, to Melbourne (9), Adelaide (2) and the Gold Coast (2).

February is the misery month for its competitors because business travel activity normally doesn’t emerge from the holiday season doldrums until then.By which time more announcements of new routes by Tiger are certain.

The problem for Cityflyer and its high fares and inefficient two class cabins is the undermining of its product by four way competition featuring increased frequency and convenience at fares that make the full service Qantas product seem out of touch with a market that has changed radically in its demands since the arrival of Virgin Blue and collapse of Ansett.

Travellers are no longer locked into return fares, because they are sold on a one way basis and single screen mix and match searches are available through on-line travel retailers and company account booking portals.

And Qantas has already shown where it sees its true interests by scheduling flights by its low fare subsidiary Jetstar head to head against the two class Cityflyers on Sydney-Melbourne contrary to its public insistence that it will do no such thing.

It seems to be more important to Qantas to contain Tiger by stalking it with increased Jetstar flights than it is to prop up the expensive operations of a full service domestic network that business travellers like but their corporate travel managers dislike.

Tiger of course doesn’t distribute its capacity through business account friendly channels, but when it comes to SMEs and individual entrepreneurs or persons controlling their own travel budgets the fare competition it is causing probably does far more to induce customers away from Qantas to Virgin Blue or Jetstar than to itself.

This doesn’t seem to worry Tiger. It is largely buying market share by giving away flights well in advance for little if anything more than the taxes, levies and charges it has to pay per seat for air traffic services (!) security screening, noise, and airport facilities.

What it plans to do once it has acquired substantially more market share is one of the bigger questions in Australian air transport at this moment.