Getting Qantas back to its best....... the word according to the airlines CEO Alan Joyce

The boss of Australian airline Qantas has released the following statement on how he thinks the carrier is doing and how it is working hard to get back to its best.

Getting it back to its best.....

As the CEO of Qantas, people are always keen to tell you how they think the airline is doing. Whatever their feedback is, I always see it first and foremost as a reflection of the strong connection Australia has with the national carrier.

To be honest, we know that connection has been tested at times.

Six months ago, a lot of people felt we’d let them down and the figures showed why. Almost half our flights were late, our rate of misplaced bags had more than doubled and we were cancelling up to 7 per cent of our schedule.

Perception wise, it didn’t help that this came after some controversial restructuring decisions to make sure we survived COVID. And it didn’t matter that airlines around the world had the same problems as travel restarted. If your flight to the Gold Coast just got cancelled, it doesn’t make you feel any better if the delays are worse in Amsterdam.

Knowing that we were routinely letting customers down was hugely disappointing for everyone at Qantas. It’s the exact opposite of our culture.

Last August, we apologised and promised to fix it. And almost every week after that, things improved.

It’s a huge credit to our people that the data now shows Qantas is back to its best.

We’ve been the most on-time of the major domestic airlines for five months in a row. Our service levels – bags, cancellations, catering and the call centre – are back to what customers expect from us. And we’re working to make it better.

As this turnaround was happening, people were talking to me less about flight delays and more about higher fares.

The two are related. In order to make our operations more reliable, we had to reduce our flying to give us more buffer. We have more aircraft and crew on standby to step-in to deal with the supply chain and sick leave issues that remain. Less supply and lots of demand meant fares went up.

Higher fares also reflect inflation in general and higher fuel prices in particular, which are up 65 per cent in the past six months compared with pre-COVID. Naturally, that flows through to how much you pay for a flight.

There’s not much we can do about the cost of things like fuel but the fact our operations have stabilised means we can steadily put capacity back in. Domestically, we’re almost back to 100 per cent of pre-COVID flying levels. Internationally, we’ll be at around 80 per cent by the middle of the year and we’ve recently seen most of our competitors announce a major ramp up in their capacity, so you can expect to see fares trend down, keeping in mind we’re all paying more for most things at the moment.

That said, there are still a lot of good value fares, with regular sales and lower prices if you’re able to plan ahead.

More recently, the conversation has been about Qantas air returns.

These have received a huge amount of attention because we had several in quick succession, but despite the hype, they are actually a symptom of strong safety systems.

Our pilots always err on the side of caution because that’s what we train them to do. If an onboard system isn’t working the way it should, they will often decide to land rather than pressing on to the destination. I congratulate them for doing that and encourage them to keep doing it. And despite the obvious inconvenience, I think most of our customers do, too.

Globally, the industry sees well over 10,000 air returns a year. Looking at our data, there’s no change from our average rate of turn backs before and after COVID, which for Qantas is around 60 a year or 1 per 2,000 flights. Our regional arm QantasLink has more, at over 200 a year, because they have more flights and it makes more sense to return to a major city than fly on to a remote town that doesn’t have the same level of technical support.

If you’re flying on an aircraft that has an issue, it’s not because it’s not well looked after. It’s because they are incredibly complex pieces of equipment with many layers of redundancy.

Our approach to engineering hasn’t changed since pre-COVID. We’re the only major airline group that does heavy maintenance in Australia and no one invests more in training engineers here than we do. There are multiple safeguards for everything that happens in-and-around an aircraft, which is critical because no one is perfect. And that is ultimately why aviation in this country is so safe.

We will always put safety before schedule. But as the figures and our record shows, Qantas is back to delivering on both

Qantas customers had more on time flights and fewer cancellations in January than in the same month pre-COVID, making the national carrier the most punctual major domestic airline for five months in a row.

This is the latest month-on-month improvement at Qantas after a turnaround that started in August 2022. It followed the lows reached in mid-2022 due to sick leave and industry-wide labour shortages, when almost half of all Qantas flights ran late and more than 7 per cent were cancelled.

Data on domestic flying for December and January, showed:

On time performance this summer peak was 78.4 per cent, better than the same period pre-COVID (December 2019-January 2020) when 76.8 per cent of flights departed on-time.

January’s performance was at its highest level since February 2022, with 81.5 per cent of flights departing on time and 75.3 per cent in December. Across both months 90 per cent of flights landed at their destination within 30 minutes of their scheduled arrival time.

Qantas outperformed its main domestic competitor on punctuality by around 7 percentage points over the summer peak and for eight out of the past 12 months.

Cancellations were 2.8 per cent in January, compared to 3.1 per cent of flights in January 2020.

The improved performance was helped by a $200 million investment to roster additional crew, train new recruits and keep up to 20 aircraft on standby that were called upon to reduce delays and cancellations. Ultimately, the improvement has only been possible with the hard work of thousands of crew and support staff across the national carrier, and the understanding of customers.

Qantas has confirmed that its turn back rate over the past 12 months remains consistent with pre-COVID. For Qantas mainline this averages 1 for every 2,000 flights or around 60 per year. Regional airline QantasLink averages over 200 air returns with a higher number of total flights and because a varying degree of technical and other support at remote airports makes it more practical to turn back to a capital city when technical or weather-related issues occur. There are more than 10,000 air returns globally each year.