Originally Posted by
1A_Please
Just had to book a colleague home from MEL to SYD tonight. Both QF and VA were full for flights between 4 and 5:30. At the same time, ZL still has seats available at just $79 on its one flight. Still didn't give REX to business though because if their 5pm flight was delayed, they only had one other flight all night and that was 8pm!
It is fair to say, the REX mainline jet operation is in more trouble than the early settlers. They may be able to develop a niche on leisure routes which would mean they would effectively just be replacing Tiger. Not a bad option and it would mean they could differentiate their product a bit and look to move into the ULCC space. Their current strategy (if you could call it that) is doomed.
I did a bit of poking around on the various booking engines earlier and Rex's load factors are diabolically low.
For instance, Rex's
fullest Sydney - Melbourne flight today was their 12.30pm, flight ZL105. That flew with a sub-40 percent load factor with just 63-odd seats filled out of 168 in the economy cabin.
The equivalent Qantas and Virgin flights, QF447 (12:30pm departure) and VA838 (12pm departure) flew with 96 percent and 82 percent economy loads respectively. When you look at the traditionally very high load factor flights like the 6.30pm departure Sydney - Melbourne, Qantas's QF483 is essentially full; when I looked this morning there was one unsold economy seat out of 162 and one out of 12 business class seats unsold.
Jetstar's 6.30pm, JQ523, is running at 100 percent.
Virgin's 6.30pm flight, VA878, was running at 83 percent (surprisingly with 7 out of 8 business class seats sold - some people like 2 minute noodles I guess).
The equivalent Rex flight, ZL153, had a grand total of 16 seats filled (and not one of the 8 business class seats sold) for a load factor of 9 percent.
Regardless of where Rex's cost base is you can not make money with those sorts of loads. And the tenting of their loads around midday suggests that they have not made any inroads to the corporate market.
I'd like to hear Sharpie's spin on this.