It is astonishing and disappointing to read this morning’s reports of Alan Joyce’s pre-half yearly results softening up speech in Melbourne yesterday.
After two years of very hard and earnest work as CEO of Qantas Joyce is still talking about working parties to work out how to fix the airline’s long haul business and rebuild its brand and the evils of open competition with wicked foreign carriers stealing its lunch, to paraphrase.
Surely it isn’t necessary to have a working party to fix the airline’s image or product. Properly cleaning the cabins of the sort of filth that filled the gap between the floor and wall of the last Qantas 767 I flew in would be a start. People do look at the muck under their feet.
And they would like to fly in something that isn’t approaching a moment when it is either flown to the Qantas Museum in Longreach or a scrap yard. The assumption that if a Qantas service isn’t available Jetstar is an acceptable alternative is surely an error. Jetstar is probably the major source of new business for Virgin Blue.
The evidence that Jetstar might be about to move upmarket, by feeding the occasional interlined backpacker, is a mixed signal, but on balance, probably a positive.
One is entitled to hope that Joyce has some good news concerning the airline’s fleet renewal strategies at the half yearly results conference on February 17. Another nine years or so of its once wonderful but now dysfunctional 747-400 fleet is just not on, and the removal of the old 767s and 737-400s is even more pressing.
The recent and apparently soon to be reversed jamming of tiny seven across seats in its A330 domestic business class cabins (and for the second time) is as clear a sign as any that somewhere near the top of Qantas there is product planning with a deep contempt for quality, or a belief that the brand can blind. The rationale for the change was that the jets would be interchangeable with Jetstar in terms of configuration, which is a damning admission.
But the weirdest message to come out of yesterday’s preliminary softening up exercise was the implication that Australia should curb competition so that Qantas could catch up with a whole series of initiatives taken by its evil competitors.
Qantas doesn’t even fly non-stop to Dubai or Abu Dhabi, the centres of darkness yet also the only hub airports in the world growing as fast as those of China. In the very near future there will, on current trends, be more premium passengers passing through the upper level of the Emirates terminal in Dubai than there are passengers flying Qantas in aggregate. If Qantas isn’t prepared to see and recognise the major new markets, and the convenience they bring to flying to secondary cities in Europe and the growth centres of China, what exactly is the Qantas message?
Apparently it wants to stop competitors running in a race it isn’t prepared to enter.
But what is good for Qantas is not good for Australia. The country needs non-stop flights to ‘minor’ Chinese cities that are larger than Sydney and Melbourne, and sometimes both combined, and it needs one stop Middle East connections to North Africa, Russia and the eastern European nations that do not involve absurd connections in London on British Airways flights.
The old thinking that grips the Qantas corporate mind continues to frustrate and baffle those who fly.
The new non-stop services to Dallas Fort Worth are very promising. But they come with the sacrifice of what were full flights to San Francisco in the process, which were claimed to be carrying insufficient business passengers. Really. Try multiplying 300 economy fares to San Francisco and putting them beside 50 premium fares and the maths seem to suggest that it doesn’t matter because the main cabin is cross subsidising the business class seats anyhow.
To suggest to business travellers going to Silicon Valley that they should now change planes in Los Angeles for the thrill of a second encounter with US airport security, and spend an extra three or four hours getting to their destination is really insulting. Most of them will be lost to Qantas and gained by United, Hawaiian, Delta, V Australia and Air New Zealand. How can this possibly be of benefit to Qantas?
The Qantas departure from San Francisco is the perfect opportunity for Singapore Airlines to offer a daily 777-300ER non-stop from Sydney or Melbourne, to fill the gap, and also restore some credibility to Australian government policy that in effect, reneged on an agreement to let the Singaporeans fly the non-stop Australia-US routes.
If Qantas is waiting for a non-stop capable 787 to operate to San Francisco under the Jetstar brand we are all going to be much older when it happens. There may be 787s by the end of 2013, please God that’s only five years later than promised, but there is no sign they will be capable of the performance required for 313 passengers non-stop each way and ETOPS 180 ready by then.
There are alarming signs that Qantas actually believed the marketing and did not inquire as to the reality of the 787. And as far as being unhappy with Rolls-Royce over the non-disclosure of what was or wasn’t happening to those engines on the wings of Qantas A380s, what did it expect from signing away the necessary levels of control over these engines in a forget-everything-and-buy-power-by-the-hour deal?
Surely the answer to Qantas problems isn’t bleating about more successful competitors, or the misfortunes of geography, but investing in the right equipment and the right people.
12 Comments
Qantas stopped flying full 747-300s to Rome some years back on the excuse that there wasn’t enough people taking up the busines class seats. The slack was picked up many times over by Emirates, Singapore, Cathay, Thai etc etc.
Australian-Italians loyal to the Qantas brand haven’t yet forgiven it.
. . oh and I forgot one important thing.
At Fiumincino, they miss that “I’m home” feeling you get when you see the flying kangaroo tail parked at your departure gate.
Seems like management at QF have forgotten that.
In response to Cat on a PC:
You’ve forgotten something else. QF still flies to FCO. The main differences are, first, that the flight now operates via Hong Kong, and, secondly, that the sector between there and FCO is code share, on a Cathay Pacific 747-400.
In my experience, CX has nicer aircraft and better in-flight service than QF. Any 747-400 is, by definition, newer than the old QF 747-300s, all of which, in any case, have now left the active QF fleet (yes, I know that one of them is still at Avalon, but it will surely never fly again). So the only QF thing now missing from FCO is the flying kangaroo tail.
I would also point out that the way QF currently serves FCO is very similar to the way V Australia has just started serving that and many other European destinations (A V Australia aircraft to Abu Dhabi, and then with Etihad the rest of the way). Both of these solutions are strongly preferable to QF’s usual “via LHR in conjunction with BA” alternative.
In fact the only reason why I wouldn’t now all but automatically prefer the V Australia option for most European destinations is that it isn’t available to residents of my home city of Perth – yet.
It should be pointed out that Air New Zealand , will by the end of the year be flying 777-300ERs to the US having allready put the 777-200ER into service a few years back.
And as well they beat Qantas to ordering 787s – being the second airline to sign up-all though changing to the later larger model. Otherwise they would have been putting the 787 into service at the end of the year as well, fingers crossed.
Sometimes you think Qantas runs flights on Mars ie its still 1976.
Me thinks from 2005 onwards the management were more interested in setting up the company for a leveraged buyout from which they would profit handsomely- and it came within a cats whisker of happening.
Grizzly, I agree 100% with your comments. I have flown that sector and Cathay do an outstanding job.
Still wish the flying kangaroo did it.
Having recently flown Etihad from Sydney to Paris in business class, V Australia has to be onto a good thing. It felt incredibly easy and the service was fantastic.
I got hit by the Q-BA mashup too many times recently: they must be paying a huge whack to the travel agents, because I couldn’t get an offering via cathay to FCO for love nor money. “not best price” nonsense, but how the hell can it work out better to fly over your desto, to hop T3 to T5?
And, dropping SFO. please. LAX is a shithole. Dallas is a 1970s shithole. It might suit the oil industry, it might suit trans-atlantic mashups, but for those of us who need the west coast of the USA, it used to be vancouver or SFO over LAX any day. And what does the bloody kanga do? closes down the ones we love and sticks to the dunny that is tom bradley.
I can’t help but wonder if QF dropping it’s SFO destination is some kind of deal with United to carve up the AU-US market. QF doesn’t have a clean slate when it comes to collusion. UA does daily flights to SFO & LAX and tails one of them down to MEL which means you just change gates (and not terminals) in SYD. UA also continues the flights through it’s hubs to the US east coast. Will QF contain itself to the southern part of the US and United the north? The flights to SFO by both airlines seem more popular that to LAX based on the fares and load factors, yet QF exit SFO. Certainly counterintuitive.
Grizzly/Cat: CX’s service is great, and if I had to go to Rome I’d definitely take SYD-HKG-FCO over SYD-LHR-FCO. However, their economy seats are bloody small and don’t recline. As someone who’s not very tall or wide, and who seldom gets to sleep on planes anyway, this doesn’t make much odds to me, but that won’t be true for everyone.
GGM: Problem is, greater LA has a population of 18 million and LAX is a big hub for QF’s partner American Airlines, while the Bay Area is only about 7 million and SFO isn’t an AA hub.
If John Borghetti has any sense, he’ll start V Australia flights to SFO as soon as possible. Two advantages: 1) winning over ex-QF passengers as a lower-cost carrier; 2) it’s the hub for the US’s best domestic airline, Virgin America, which would allow V to reach almost every major US city by codeshare and present a far better through offering than QF+AA.
(then again, as with Virgin Atlantic’s SYD-HKG-LHR flights, Virgin Blue seems to be bizarrely obtuse when it comes to beneficial international codeshares with other Virgin-affiliated companies…)
“Qantas doesn’t even fly non-stop to Dubai or Abu Dhabi”. Does it fly there under any circumstance?
QF could hook up with BA at Dubai – it would be a more direct routing. But, then, that does nothing for anybody who wants to be in mainland Europe. The problem is that oneworld (who’s the branding idiot who insisted that it is not capitalized – why does anybody want their brand looking like incorrect spelling or grammar?) is useless for anybody coming from east of Europe, with its hubs in London and Madrid. And Iberia does not fly to Dubai or Abu Dhabi, either.
Oh – and people notice the trash and filth in seat back pockets and tray tables, too.
I’d agree about the cross country 767 experience and the lack of cabin cleanliness. Both ways across Australia last week the entertainment system non-functional and clearly hard to reset. The staff, as cheerful as ever, must wonder themselves what else is wrong with these old planes.
But here’s the bit I really do not understand. PER to SYD last Thursday at 09.35. Most seats in cattle class empty. The people who manage the booking system ( I presume doing a very regular upgrades) see what is going on in terms of seat sales. Why then do they not reduce the prices to fill the empties?