Memo Steve Creedy: This sort of regurgitation of Jetstar spin won't wash any longer...
Jetstar's overseas growth doubles: travel recovery
- Steve Creedy, Aviation writer
- From: The Australian
- March 27, 2010 12:00AM
- JETSTAR has laid claim to the title of the third-biggest international airline servicing Australia after impressive growth in February international passenger numbers that were 91.3 per cent higher than a year ago.
The doubling in size of Jetstar's international arm underscores the growing presence of low-cost carriers, which now account for more than one in five flights on Australian overseas routes.
The Jetstar figures and an overall 14.2 per cent rise in Qantas Group February passenger numbers also bode well for the recovery of the travel industry generally and will step up competition with rival Virgin.
Qantas reported yesterday that it was filling more seats on its planes across the group and that yields were continuing to improve. Group traffic rose by 3.8 per cent in February, to push up the overall seat factor by 1 percentage point to 79.4 per cent.
Jetstar International, which will service 12 destinations when it starts flying to Fiji on Monday, continued to close the gap with Qantas and carried 310,000 passengers for the month,
compared with Qantas international's 462,000. Its impressive growth outstripped rising capacity to see it fill more of its seats, its load factor rising a strong 5.3 percentage points to 79.7 per cent.
Based on what we know, this figure was morely likely around 175,000 passengers in and out of Australia at approx 20% of the ASK's of mainline. The alleged growth comes almost entirely from the replacement of QF NZ with J* NZ and the carriage of NZ DOMESTIC passengers.
Thats right, mainline still dwarfs Jetstar International in the figures that matter. Any other interpretation is either lazy journalism or something worse.
