JETSTAR chief executive Alan Joyce will come on a rescue mission to Tasmania next week amid growing controversy about cancellations of the budget airline's service to the state.
Will Alan be flying mainline or Jetstar? If he flies Jetstar, will he board the plane first???
In all seriousness, I agree with Ditzy - people are giving Jetstar an unfair go. At a time of year when demand is lowest, capacity has been increased over 30%. June load factors seemed OK, but then a quiet period in July, however they have still grown the market - just not by 30-40% in one month! Summer numbers are almost 50% higher than winter ones, so come summer, the load factor is going to bo over the roof if the current schedule is maintained!
People winge about 15 flights a week being cut from July 21-31, but they forget that effective July 21, Jetstar had planned to increase HBA-MEL flights by 4 per week, thus there are only 11 cancellations.
What are Jetstar to do? They see in advance numbers are down, so they have a $39 sale, which they have extended 2 or 3 times. If the seats didn't fill up, they can cancel some services. When J*/QF have HBA-MEL flights at 15:35,16:30,17:00 and 17:30, then chopping one of these temporarily doesn't put anyone out too much does it? Anyway, they said no more changes expected after July 31, so this shouldn't be an issue by next week!
Does anyone praise J* for their recent schedule change to SYD-HBA? No! Effective 1 Sep, they are going to considerable effort to operate an early morning service instead of their current lunchtime service.
Whilst I am for J* to HBA (as I believe there is a market for really cheap seats here), I think QF/J* have the ratio of flights wrong. I would love to see itemised load factor stats for the 3 airlines on the HBA-MEL route, because I think QF would be very high, then DJ and J* quite low. If QF operated 3 or 4 services a day to MEL, and J* 5 or 6, then better results would be achieved.
Let's hope that in the new schedule period from Nov, that this occurs. I would also like to see J* operate HBA-ADL non-stop, as they promote themselves as a point to point airline, and people won't travel with them if they have to connect in MEL. They might think of something like operating ADL-HBA 3 or 4 days a week, and on the other days do ADL-MCY or something like that? And before people bag me, look through the history about how I winged about a HBA-BNE service before anyone was operating it, and now we have two airlines with daily flights on that route!
