Qantas cooking the books on passenger numbers
Ben Sandilands writes:
JETSTAR, QANTAS
Qantas is inflating its stock exchange filings of monthly data for its Jetstar International operations with those of its Jetstar New Zealand domestic operation.
The anomalous figures have been referred to the ASX following an analysis of the January traffic figures by "Captain Kremin", a regular poster on Pprune.org, the Professional Pilots Rumour Network.
For the month of January, Qantas claimed to have boarded 358,000 paying passengers on Jetstar International flights to or from Australia with a revenue load factor of 78.5%. However, Kremin added up all of the seats available on Jetstar International flights. "This is physically impossible to achieve with JQ's Australian fleet and schedules," he found.
"Analysis of the Jetstar schedules shows a massive shortfall in the number of available seats on purely international flights in and out of Australia. There were only approximately 241,000 seats available on those flights in January."
His argument is that Jetstar is not only counting those flown trips entirely within New Zealand but those flying on Australian domestic services that connect with, or continue as, Jetstar International flights. He points out anyone can book a purely domestic seat on these feeder flights, mainly Sydney-Melbourne, and be counted as an international passenger.
Captain Kremin, who has been a thorn in the side of Qantas online for some time, said: "Failure to acknowledge that approximately half of their passengers are flown on domestic sectors in Australia and, incredibly, New Zealand, is misleading at best. Perhaps it is also something that investors should be informed about.
"If I am right the they only carried approximately 190,000 passengers in and out of Australia in January instead of the 358,000 they are attempting to project."
The apparent exaggeration of Jetstar International’s success will be a sore point with those Qantas employees who argue the company is transferring massive assets or subsidies into the low-cost subsidiaries operations in order to hollow out and collapse the terms and conditions under which they work.
This child-eating-the-parent concern is very widespread in a Qantas that is now the junior source of profits for the group.
In response, a Qantas spokesperson conceded Kremin’s analysis of the figures was correct, but defended its inclusion of purely NZ domestic statistics in its international figures as something it had always done.
Qantas also said all passengers on board domestic flights in the Qantas or Jetstar brands that carried international flight numbers for a service with an ultimate destination overseas were counted as international, even if they were getting off before the flight left Australia. (This would have the effect of depressing the reported market share of Qantas compared to Virgin Blue.)