Qantas is planning to increase its capacity to meet the high passenger demand ahead of Easter holidays. Qantas will increase flights on the Sydney-Melbourne-Brisbane triangle by 57 additional return services per week, increasing capacity by 11 points to 93% of pre-COVID levels.
Qantas is also adding seats on transcontinental services to-and-from Perth using Airbus A330 fleet. With this, around 50% of Qantas’ flights from Melbourne and Sydney to Perth will be operated by widebody aircraft.
Over the next six months, Jetstar is boosting its domestic and international flying capacity by around 15 percentage points, with another four new Airbus A321neo LR aircraft expected to join its growing fleet, bringing the total number of these next-generation aircraft to nine.
The airline is adding a fourth weekly flight over the Easter holidays on its popular Melbourne to Margaret River (Busselton) service, boosting capacity by up to 1000 seats over the peak.
Overall, Group domestic capacity will increase to 102% in the April quarter, up from 98 this quarter.
Qantas will also ramp its international operations with resumption of Melbourne-Tokyo route. The airline will ramp its Singapore capacity with 10 weekly flights on Melbourne-Singapore route. Qantas Brisbane-Singapore will increase from six per week to daily while Jetstar will launch the new Brisbane-Auckland service effective March 26, 2023.
Qantas will also commence the Qantas to commence Melbourne-Jakarta service from April 16, 2023.
This increase in capacity comes as the Group gears up for another busy Easter holiday period. Qantas and Jetstar expect to carry several million passengers across the three-week school holiday period.
Across the Easter long weekend from Thursday, April 6 to Monday April 10, the Group expects over 700,000 passengers to travel on almost 5,300 domestic and international services.
Qantas continued to be the most on-time domestic airline in February 2023 as per the data released by the government. About 78.3% of Qantas flights departed on time almost in line with the pre-COVID performance.