By the time this bulletin is published, Tiger Airways is expected to be minutes away from announcing its resumption of domestic services in Australia following the lifting of the suspension of its operating licence by CASA on July 1.

It will be a much leaner Tiger than before, concentrating on a small range of major domestic routes including Sydney-Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth, Brisbane and the Gold Coast but details of fares and frequencies have not yet been released.

And it will be a compliant Tiger. No other mainline airline in Australian history has been as dumb or stubborn when it came to an inability or unwillingness to understand the most basic and clearly defined obligations it had to respect and obey the safety rules that are a condition of the Singapore-owned carrier flying within Australia.

By coincidence, the release this morning of the August edition of official department of Infrastructure and Transport domestic airfare surveys show that Tiger may as well have not been operating at all in terms of its claimed successes in driving down fares since it began domestic Australian flights late in 2007.

The surveys, released in the first half of each month, did not of course include any Tiger fares in July or so far this month, but even without Tiger in the market the best discounted fare index 13-month rolling average continued its falling trend since March this year, and is currently at 89% of its value in July 2003, when the series began, at a time when there was no Jetstar or Tiger, only Qantas and Virgin Blue. Go figure.

However, the nature of this continuing survey by the BITRE needs be kept in mind. It isn’t based on the average of the actual fares bought, because the airlines keep them confidential, but on a weighted by size-of-route assessment of trends in advertised best-discount economy, restricted economy, full economy and business class between Australian cities. In other words, its all about trends rather than route-by-route prices, and in the case of best discount and restricted economy fares, can be distorted by advertised fares that might have been almost unobtainable to consumers.

In the other categories, domestic business class (overwhelmingly available as Qantas fares) are about 8% above July 2003 values but still short of the 10% rise recorded by the middle of 2008, full economy was at slightly up in August yet 11% below the 2003 benchmark, and restricted economy fares had also climbed slightly so far this month but were nevertheless surveyed at being about 68% of their price eight years ago.

There are almost as many issues with these indices as there are with Tiger’s inability to obey the rules. Consumers now face a market in which Jetstar sells full or “Max” fares that are often higher than the best restricted Qantas economy fare, and Tiger before it was suspended was occasionally advertising outrageously high fares at short notice that were at times on the now-dropped Canberra route much higher than available fares on Qantaslink and Virgin Australia flights. Yet another case of the statistics failing to support common assumptions about air fares.

With Tiger coming back into the market, the burning question is how it will price its product, given the losses it had already experienced as a self-proclaimed but ineffective price leader and the need to induce travellers to trust it with their lives.