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Australia’s two busiest regional airports are hoping they can strike deals with Qatar Airways after the airline’s failed bid to operate extra weekly flights into three major capitals.
Key points:
- Operators of the Cairns and Gold Coast airports believe increased competition would lower airfares
- The bilateral agreement preventing Qatar Airways from increasing flights to four major cities doesn’t apply to regional airports
- Cairns and Gold Coast Airports say they are talking to Qatar Airways
The federal government’s decision to block Qatar Airways’ request to operate 21 extra weekly flights into Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane has proven controversial.
Australia’s bilateral agreement with Qatar caps the number of flights the airline can operate to those cities, along with Perth, but it does not restrict it from servicing other airports, such as those on the Gold Coast and in Cairns.
Cairns Airport chief executive Richard Barker said additional capacity would lead to “better choice and lower prices”.
“That’s part of the reason we’re talking to airlines such as Qatar ourselves,” he said.
Queensland Airports Limited (QAL), which operates the Gold Coast Airport, is also trying to secure a relationship with Qatar Airways.
Chief commercial officer Adam Rowe said QAL estimated the economic benefit of a direct link with Qatar Airways would be about $160 million.
“So there are significant benefits to our local tourism industry and anyone servicing travellers, both inbound and outbound,” he said.
“On top of that, you’ve got the importance of those business ties and freight links as well for our exporters, which come with any new international wide-body service.”
In explaining QAL’s reason for attempting to broker a deal with Qatar, Mr Rowe echoed what many in the aviation sector have been saying for the past month.
“More competition creates more supply and therefore more fares available for a reasonable price,” he said.
“We are very much on a mission to make sure we’re getting as many services as we can into our airports to make sure that we’re driving down prices for consumers.”
Confidence in demand
Qatar has never flown to any regional cities in Australia, although it did previously fly to Canberra Airport.
Gui Lohmann, a professor of air transport and tourism management at Griffith University, said international aviation capacity was slowly rebounding, although airlines would only create new routes if justified by demand.
“At the moment, what we are seeing in terms of demand is mostly Australians going overseas than our industry being able to bring tourists back,” he said.
Mr Rowe said QAL had conducted its own analysis of passenger movements between the Gold Coast and the United Kingdom and Europe.
He said more than 370,000 people were already making that journey each year on flights connecting through “somewhere like Doha”.
“That means there’s enough demand for two services every single day from and airline such as Qatar,” he said.
“From our perspective, the demand is already there and it’s about getting the capacity in to service that demand.”
Qatar Airways has been contacted for comment.
Industry in recovery
Michael Healy, the state MP for Cairns and assistant tourism minister, said he was “absolutely dumbfounded” that the federal government refused Qatar Airways’ request for more flights while the Queensland government and the state’s four international airports were spending $200 million to boost inbound international services to the state.
Tourism and Events Queensland has not resumed publishing regional international visitation data since the COVID-19 pandemic.
But the most recent stats from 2019 showed there were more than 1 million international visitors to the Gold Coast and more than 800,000 to tropical north Queensland.
This month, 54 international flights a week are landing at Gold Coast Airport — a greater frequency of arrivals than during several months in 2019.
International traffic at Cairns Airport is still lower than mid-2019 levels, however, and the city no longer has direct arrivals from Hong Kong or mainland China.
Cathay Pacific stopped operating its direct flights to Cairns in late 2019, before the pandemic, for commercial reasons.
Business and tourism leaders who recently travelled to Hong Kong in the hope of attracting the airline back to the far north, have previously said it would be months before Cathay Pacific made a decision on restarting the route.
Virgin Australia has begun operating a direct service between Cairns and Tokyo – its first to Japan – that connects Australia with northern hemisphere destinations.
Singapore Airlines also recently announced it would increase its capacity to Cairns from 1,540 to 2,424 seats weekly from March next year.
There are also plans to ramp up marketing of Far North Queensland to prospective overseas visitors, particularly in western Europe and the United Kingdom, Cairns Airport chief executive Richard Barker said.
“We know there’s a lot of interest in coming to our region but they were having difficulty getting flights, so that capacity is much needed and we’ve got a challenge to get that full,” he said.
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