Originally Posted by
dragon man
Very sad day for the staff and suppliers who are owed money as well as the public that even more so now are at the mercy of the Qantas close to monopoly.
63% isn't even close to a 'monopoly'. 100% is an actual monopoly.
People need to stop saying this. Of course, the predictable response from the brainless media has been that it's all Qantas' and Virgin's fault for their duopoly. Except that this airline did not operate on any routes that I can see that either QF or VA operated on and the whole thing appears to have been stymied by a new owner of the aircraft who's decided that they can make more money leasing them to someone else.
If Qantas or Virgin had anything like a monopoly, there wouldn't be an Air North or a Rex.
Rex in particular has proven that if you pick the right market, by in their case, combining two previous regional carriers into one, giving them scale, then take your time and move into mainline flying on trunk routes, you can build and expand a sustainable business.
The media and others need to stop blaming Qantas and Virgin for bad business models and lack of planning.
Take out the Qantas portion of the market and Virgin Australia has nearly all the rest, so it's not a Qantas monopoly. I seem to remember part of Virgin's demise during Covid can be traced in part back to it's former CEO deciding to initiate a fare war with Qantas, along with introducing A330s on exorbitant leases that ran at a loss, parking major parts of the fleet then paying Alliance to do the flying, dumping the A320 from TT and introducing the 737, letting most of the A320 drivers go then realising that hadn't got the 737 on the AOC yet, having 737 drivers sitting around with no flying to do - to say nothing of the utter cluster**k that was TT operating into DPS, ignoring Indonesian government directions v.v. not subcontracting the route(s), even to a 100% subsidiary.
Pathetically bad business decisions stopped Virgin from steadily increasing it's market share and clawing back more of the market from QF.
I just wonder when the penny is going to drop in this country with the realisation that a population of 27M people cannot sustain more than 2 major carriers other than smaller ones with pretty much niche markets.
Remind me, how many major airlines are there in Canada again, with population not much more than ours (5-10M more)? Seem to remember them once having AC and CP, CP basically collapsed and had to be absorbed into AC, then WS emerged and back to no more than 2 major carriers (yes, I know TS exists but it's a minnow compared to WS and AC, a bit like Rex but international focused).