Qantas slashes peak tourism season flights to Central Australia

Monday, February 27, 2023

Tourism Central Australia (TCA) is reeling from another round of cuts to Qantas seats in and out of the region less than a week after the national carrier announced a billion-dollar profit.

TCA chief executive Danial Rochford said Qantas had confirmed to him it was planning to cut another 30,000 seats during the 2023 peak tourism season.

Mr. Rochford said as head of tourism, that’s gut wrenching for his members and gut wrenching for the community.

He also said the seats would be cut from in and outbound flights for Alice Springs and Yulara between March and October.

He expected the region would lose up to two Melbourne services in the coming months.

Out of Yulara they’re losing a Melbourne service and they’ve had a change of aircraft type on the Cairns to Uluru service, which has seen a massive [seat] reduction also, he said.

Mr Rochford said the region had lost 60,000 seats — a quarter of pre- pandemic capacity — in one year.

Last year, they saw a heavy reduction from in and out of Adelaide, he said.

‘Roll up your sleeves’

Mr Rochford said it was time for the Northern Territory government to intervene.

This is clearly a situation where our region and our industry is having the rug pulled out from under them, he said.

They need their government, like all the other governments of Australia who actively roll their sleeves up and attract and incentivise airlines to come to their jurisdictions.

He said the NT government was not doing that.

Mr Rochford said that it was a clever strategy to decrease capacity which ultimately increases airfares.

Last week, Qantas announced a billion-dollar profit, he said.

Now no one in Alice Springs is rejoicing about that because every one of your listeners know that that $1 billion was very much written on the back of increased airfares out of regional and remote Australia, he said.

Qantas capacity reduced

Qantas confirmed the number of seats cut from in and out bound from the region.

Tt said in a statement that they had forecast higher demand on flights to and from Alice Springs and added additional capacity into their schedule.

But, given that demand hasn’t materialised they are pulling back on some of these additional flights and will use smaller aircraft on some routes.

Despite the changes, they are operating a similar amount of capacity from Alice Springs between April and October as they did at the same time last year.

Across the Northern Territory, they are actually increasing capacity over the coming months and will be back above our pre-COVID flying by the middle of the year.

NT Business Minister Paul Kirby said Qantas was responsible for the operational side as a business.

It is traditionally very, very hard to convince airlines into what flights they should be putting on at what particular price they think they should be putting them on, Mr Kirby said.

They’ll continue to work with them as much as they can, but that’s an operational decision those airlines make.

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