The timing couldn’t be more painful. Just over a week after Qantas posted its record breaking losses, and had its group CEO try and get a $3 billion unsecured loan from taxpayers, Emirates says the partnership with Qantas has been very satisfactory.
In this
interview at a trade show the Dubai based carrier’s Chief Commercial Officer Thierry Antinori says Qantas has given it more business class passengers, boosted yields, and more than offset pressure on its economy class sales.
What a triumph for Qantas, and for the previous government, that failed to ask a single question in public about the benefits the Australian carrier would get from giving away much of its network to London and Europe and even SE Asia to the giant government owned UAE carrier.
In the period covered by its first half financial disaster, the one that saw Qantas beg for favouritism from the Abbott government because of the wickedness of foreign carriers other than Emirates, the Qantas-Emirates partnership was in full swing.
For what? All Qantas achieved was to let previously loyal customers know that it was OK to fly on a foreign airline after all, and that it couldn’t be bothered offering services to London and Frankfurt via Singapore anymore from Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth. In fact it can’t be bothered with doing anything overseas from Perth, having cancelled its last international service can’t be bothered with doing anything overseas from Perth, having cancelled its last international service from Australia’s resources capital in its own metal.
Qantas didn’t negotiate any cash value from the give away. Emirates got it for free, at a time when international flight demand between Australia and the world was growing at a record rate, causing it to complain about excess capacity at a time when it was gifting its business to the biggest sovereign owned carrier on the planet.
All that nonsense that came from some captive financial analysts about the benefits of the Emirates deal for Qantas makes them look like complete fools. Qantas got nothing, it undermined its credentials as an Australian flag carrier, and Emirates is doing so well in this market that it is replacing its 777 flights with larger Airbus A380s on some routes, and will quite likely, on current indications, be an all A380 carrier to this country by 2020.
Well done Mr Joyce. What a disgraceful and inexcusable cop out.
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/planetalk...-its-earnings/