Rudderless et al,
Your suggestion about embedding a LCC within a Legacy carrier is certainly interesting and has much merit to it except for the major drawback that it won't work.
Certainly major carriers do and always will have discount pax as a significant % of their loads. That is true especially on flights of less than about 2 hours which is say about 85% of Australian passenger boardings each day. True in the US too.
It's just that the flexibility exhibited by LCCs (and yes their employees are usually not as well paid-but there are way more jobs overall) means that the legacy carriers cannot adapt and offer the across the board cost base needed to meet the competition.
Don't you think that if your idea could work then the myriad carriers worldwide being slowly eaten up by LCCs would have done it already? That may one day be the future if JQ and QF finally merge.....but not yet while the market is still really in it's adolescence.
Taking the very high density routes in and out of OOL (MEL and SYD to OOL especially). All but a tiny portion of traffic there is very price senisitive and there'd be no pax "up the front" of a legacy carrier however many there were behind the curtain.
Brand separation is the key to the LCC formula. You can leverage off the parent identity and image (as DFOs do with their full cost parents) but it takes a seperate entity to do it properly.
The proof of the pudding is there anyway....passengers now use the internet to "vote with their feet" and for the large % who are price sensitive they're choosing
VB, Tiger and JQ.
Jetstar's Charter is out there in public. Doubters now have a great and visible yardstick to measure actual performance against. I think that's a great thing. We will certainly see whether they live up to it. I would find it hard to support the case that the world would be a better place had they considered such a Charter but decided NOT to offer it.
If the varying unions who make up QF's labour cost base feel that they could offer an "LCC friendly" EBA that would offer the cost and flexibility needed to effectively compete against Tiger and
VB then I am sure that QF would love to look at it. Hasn't happened yet except as an actof desperation for airlines in Chapter 11 in the US but it could happen.
In the mean time, just ponder for a moment the thought of QF legacy lumbering along with it's $150,000 pa Second Officers at the lower end of their food chain while someone else's LCCs eat into the heartland of their price sensitive traffic.It wouldn't be pretty at all.....JQ may not be perfect....and almost certainly isn't....but it is way better for QF employees that any other option.