Qantas has flown the famed Kangaroo Route between Australia and Britain via Singapore for 65 years.
But now it’s goodbye Singapore and hello Dubai with Qantas, in financial meltdown on its long haul routes, announcing that it’s teamed up with Emirates Airlines to fly return flights from Melbourne and Sydney to Dubai, connecting with Emirates flights to and from London.
Qantas will continue to focus heavily on Asia – though Thailand is not in its plans at the moment. Indeed, Qantas downgraded its Bangkok operation in favour of Singapore several years ago and binned the Bangkok-London route in March this year.
However, its low cost carrier, Jetstar, services Phuket via Singapore and Qantas will retime direct flights to Singapore and Hong Kong.
Its new partnership [no equity stake either side] represents a painful but necessary break from a 17-year joint-venture with British Airways on the “Kangaroo Route,” between London and Australia via Singapore.
The break with Singapore will be particularly poignant for Qantas. The connection goes back to 1935 when the Australian flag carrier made its first international flight to the Lion City from Brisbane, to connect with Imperial Airways’ service to London.
Qantas and Emirates are a study in contrasts. Qantas is a national icon, embodied in the Peter Allen song I Still Call Australia Home. It is the world’s oldest continuously operated airline and, at 92 years, the second oldest [Holland’s KLM is the oldest, but disappeared briefly during Germany’s World War II occuipation of the Netherlands].
Emirates is only 27 years old. Originally backed by the Sheikhs of Dubai in 1985 it has, after making a profit in its first nine months, rapidly expanded to become one of the world’s premier airlines.
The Kangaroo Route was first flown by Qantas in 1947, with a Lockheed Constellation taking 29 passengers and crew from Sydney to London with stopovers in Darwin, Singapore, Kolkota, Karachi, Cairo and Tripoli for £585 [around B300,000 in today’s money].
Qantas seems to like giving names to its routes to London. It has had the “Southern Cross Route”, via the United States and the Pacific, and the “Fiesta Route” via Tahiti, Mexico and the Caribbean.
The route via Dubai – the “Oil Route”? – will have the advantage to Qantas of docking its giant Airbus A380 aircraft at a dedicated concourse in Terminal 3 at Dubai International Airport, which has up to now been for Emirates’ exclusive use.
Qantas will be the only other airline using Terminal 3 which, at almost 2 million square metres, is the the third largest building by area in the world.
The new deal aligns ticket prices and schedules on the two airlines between Europe and Australia and, as such, is a step beyond the traditional code-sharing arrangement which involves cross-selling of seats on aircraft with which an airline has a code-share agreement.
Oneworld, the alliance to which Qantas belongs, will be watching closely. Emirates is on record as opposing alliances, with its President, Tim Clark, describing them as “an anachronism”.
Qantas says it will remain in Oneworld which, in turn, says it is “flexible” enough to accommodate the new partnership.
For Emirates the deal is a significant departure from its previous policy of shunning closer commercial ties with its rivals – a policy that seems to have worked well; Emirates is now one of the largest international passenger carriers in the world.
Singapore Airlines will be hit hard by the new arrangement. It has derived as much as a quarter of its revenue from the Kangaroo Route by offering more than 40,000 weekly outbound seats to hubs in Asia and the Middle East. British Airways will not be so badly hit, though the Kangaroo Route was still lucrative for it.
Alastair Carthew is a Phuket-based journalist and public relations professional with extensive experience in the aviation industry. alastair@phuketpublicrelations.com