It is ironic that Todd said that he found my website after I blogged about the Australian Airline industry, because I intended on posting about it today...
I am going on holidays in a few weeks, and will be flying on Jetstar (yes, that Jetstar). Not because I wanted to fly Jetstar in particular, they just had the best combination of pricing and availability when I wanted to fly. My return flight though is with Jetstar's big brother Qantas.
I last flew Qantas about two years ago, and it seems a lot has changed since then. Back then, Ansett had just gone under and Virgin Blue was relatively new in the marketplace, and making decent inroads. So Qantas realised that it had to cut costs to survive. So, some good things happened to increase efficiencies, but it was about that time when Qantas apparently foresaw a future where the customer got less service.
The most noticeable thing about Qantas circa 2002 was that it started to reconfigure some of its planes, getting rid of business class seats, and creating the all economy QantasLink. But more noticeable to me was that despite flying in the early evening, the inflight dinner (that I expected) had become a cold, rabbit-food like salad roll thingy shoved into a designer box as well as the traditional sealed cup of water that explodes everywhere when you open it.
Surprisingly (because airline food is notoroiously bad), this created lots of complaints, particularly from Qantas' bread-and-butter customers like middle-managers and small business people who flew in economy. So this week Qantas announced that the pretty little boxes have gone, and that passengers will now be served hot breakkies, hot dinners and decent lunches. And some of the planes that lost their Business Class seats have got them back again.
And why has all this happened? Three Guesses.
Jetstar.
If you are a leisure traveller who wants low-cost, low frills flights, where the food costs extra, and to save time and airline money you don't even make a seat reservation. Jump on Jetstar.
Which means that Qantas can get on with repositioning itself as a full-service carrier, while Jetstar and Virgin Blue can slug it out at the budget conscious end of the market.
I am looking forward to making some comparisons about just how different the airlines actually are. Plus I am going to get a food tray with something wrapped in foil. Can'twait to dig under that foil!
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