Whats new is that the common non aerosexual's are getting a better deal=cheaper flights! Very simple!
And.......those cheap flights are resulting in massive business losses.
Air Asia X, Qantas Group, Virgin. All loosing money.
It's simply not sustainable.
The perfect utopia would be to lower ticket prices even further, stimulating the market and getting "more people to fly for less" (now where have I heard that before?)
However, the airlines would put themselves out of business in the process.
The JQ business is a "blocker move", it was suppose to saturate capacity at places like Sydney airport to ensure no other entity could fill those spare aircraft movements. JQ was suppose to utilise gate space at the old Ansett Terminal Sydney to ensure no other airline expanded (VOZ, Ozjet, Tiger) to fill that void.
However the desire to protect QF mainline from the growth of other carriers HAS lead to the Cannibalisation of Mainline routes.
Instead of JQ flying on non trunk routes to destinations other than those served by mainline, they had to reduce their costs or go out of business in the LCC market. The only way they could reduce costs was scale. The increase in JQ aircraft fleet and network to achieve economy of scale lead to the saturation of the market of the Orange & Silver tails.
This from Wikepedia regarding Starbucks strategy
A good comparison is the Starbucks brand. The company strove to have a Starbucks store on every street corner. Saturate the market.
Some of the methods Starbucks has used to expand and maintain their dominant market position, including buying out competitors' leases, intentionally operating at a loss, and clustering several locations in a small geographical area (i.e., saturating the market), have been labeled anti-competitive by critics
Sound familiar with the JQ Australia & Asia Expansion?