The provisional Qantas traffic figures for April and the 10 months to the end of April show that it continues to shrink on domestic routes while Virgin Blue and Tiger and its own Jetstar are all growing strongly in size and market share.
Unlike Virgin Blue, Qantas also includes guidance on yields, and says that in the those 10 months (excluding foreign exchange considerations) its three domestic brands, Qantas mainline, Qantaslink regional and Jetstar made 4.3% less on sales.
This is not a good number, unless Qantas is compared to airlines abroad, in which case it is stellar, but there is no comparable Virgin Blue guidance as to how its domestic profitability is tracking in the same period.
Neither airline structures its ASX reporting to allow concise comparisons.
In April Qantas domestic carried 2.4% fewer passengers (with RPKs down 2%) while Virgin Blue lifted 3.1% more (RPKs up 5.1%).
But Virgin Blue also competes domestically with Qantaslink (down 2% by passengers and down 4.8% by RPKs) and Jetstar up 10.6% in passengers and 8.6% in RPKs.
In the 10 months to end of April, which should wipe out the Easter holidays effect because they fell in March in 2008, we find Virgin Blue growing domestically by 5.6% in numbers and a similar 5.8% margin in RPKs while Qantas full service went backwards by 4.4% in both measures, Qantaslink was off by 2.3% but up by 1.3% in RPKs and Jetstar was up 8.7% in passengers and 7.2% in RPKs.
What conclusions are allowed by these figures?
The first is that Virgin Blue is gaining market share at the expense of the full service Qantas brands.
The second is that Jetstar is out performing the Qantas full service offering too, and by a big margin which further erodes the credibility of them in the economic downturn.
The figures do not allow any firm conclusion to be made as to how much the introduction of V Australia flights to the US is harming the overall performance of Virgin Blue, except that all the signs and guidance have pointed to real harm being done.
The international figures for Qantas, and the group figures shown below illustrate how well by world standards Qantas has done, and how critical Jetstar has been to its survival.
In those 10 months the group figures for Virgin Blue, below, also show impressive growth, but it is the V Australia start up costs which will tell a fuller story when it reports its full year results, like Qantas, in August.
