Survival will depend on passenger treatment also, offering fares at Jetstar levels, does this mean treating them like Jetstar passengers when things go wrong?
I have a feeling they will treat them more like Tiger passengers when things go wrong. The fleet sizes will be similar, the scrutiny around spending cash will be similar, and a old fleet will be similar.
Tiger destroyed itself in Jan of 2008 after they commenced operations when they started canceling flights due to engineering and they didn’t have much ability to transfer these people onto future fights due to full, and no ability to add on more flights. They did as little as possible to spend as little as possible, as we all know, rescheduling around engineering is expensive. Executives told the media, passengers will get refunds in 90 days and ‘should have purchased travel insurance- not our problem’. It will just all downhill from there.
Rex won’t want to spend cash looking after its passengers. Mark my words, those 738s will break down, no different to Tiger, well they are the same and older. I will avoid them due to this reason alone, most certainly aware of the engineering issues these older birds have had in the last. Jetstar is tight and might be an hour late, however the A321S is more reliable, and I won’t sit there looking out the window waiting for a Rex engineer trying to fix VOP or VUF for the thousandth time.