Qantas reopens international flight bookings

Sales of tickets for flights to the US and London have been brought forward for departures from July 1, after the national carrier had previously removed these flagship routes from its flight schedule until at least October 2021.Flights to London, Los Angeles and Dallas will be operated by the airline’s Boeing 787-9 fleet.However plans to restart flights to Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan from March 29 have now been abandoned, with tickets on those sectors now only available for travel from July 1.“We continue to review and update our international schedule in response to the developing COVID-19 situation,” the airline said in a statement on Tuesday.“Recently we have aligned the selling of our international services to reflect our expectation that international travel will begin to restart from July 2021.”Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce has previously said that a COVID-19 vaccination will be compulsory for all passengers on the airline’s international flights, with the exception of designated travel bubbles.“We’ve asked some of our customers their thoughts on this and 87 per cent said they would take a COVID-19 vaccine if it was required to travel internationally, and 85 per cent thought it should be required for travel to at least some countries,” Mr Joyce said in December. “I’ve never seen research that is as strong on a single issue as this one, so clearly this is the right decision for us to take forward.”Ahead of the recent domestic border closures Qantas been ramping up its domestic capacity to 68 per cent in December, forecasting it would rise to 80 per cent in the three months from January to March.The airline signalled plans to service 62 domestic routes this year, up from the 57 destinations it covered pre-COVID, and had been trialling new routes such as Canberra to Cairns and Hobart to Perth.“We are seeing demand on routes we would never have operated before actually appearing because people can do that. So you will see Qantas doing a lot of this,” Mr Joyce has said.However the ramp-up has now been curtailed following the closure of numerous state borders.
Mr Joyce has previously strongly criticised various state governments for continuing to open and close internal state borders based on political rather than medical reasons.After bleeding cash at the rate of $40m a week during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the airline is anticipating it will be cashflow positive in the second half of the 2021 financial year.Qantas shares were trading 7c, or 1.5 per cent lower at $4.84 on Tuesday morning but are still more than double the $2.01 level they fell to at the end of March 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic gripped the world.