Alan Joyce Reveals When Flights Prices Will Go Back To Normal

Alan Joyce has shared when he reckons flight prices will stop being so bloody extortionate – when inflation chills out, capacity returns to normal and if/when the war in Ukraine ends.


Speaking to Oliver Peterson on Perth Live, on 6PR Perth radio, Qantas CEO, Alan Joyce recently said Qantas was trying to wrangle a deal with Air France to put on direct flights from Perth to Paris (“we’d love to be able to do Paris and we’re talking to Air France and other European airlines about how we could do that”).

He also shared his thoughts on when flight prices, which are up across the board, will calm down again. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like being any time soon. Mr Joyce said: “We want to put more A330s on East-West, we’re the only airline now that flies wide bodies on East-West.”

“We have put more on in recent months, but at the moment because our 380s are taking a while to activate, the 330s are being used to help with growing international operations and keeping international airfares down because they are the only aircraft that can fly that range out of Australia.”

“Eventually, as the 380s come back into operation, we’ll be bringing those aircraft back into the domestic operation to upgrade the services between the East and the West.”

Alan Joyce

Mr Joyce added: “We’re almost back to 100% capacity domestically as compared to where we were pre covid (roughly), and by the end of this calendar year we’ll be over 110% of pre covid capacity levels domestically.”

“Internationally, for everybody, it’s taking a while. We’ll be by the middle of the year back to 80% (capacity). A lot of our competitors are behind us on that. There are a couple of reasons why the airfares are high. The first is inflation, which is going to stick with us.”

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Mr Joyce said that said we’ve had it for 3 years and “for us [Qantas], particularly the fuel prices involved in flying aircraft are up 65% compared to pre covid. So unless fuel comes down and maybe if the Ukraine war ends we could see a reduction in fuel, but at the moment that’s a big imposition on air fares.”

“The second [reason flights are expensive] is getting the capacity up and running. That’s having a bigger impact on international [flights], but we are seeing a lot of capacity being added back in and airfares are coming down more and more as we get through this year we think those issues will be resolved.”

Image Credit: Qantas

Finally, there are supply chain issues. Mr Joyce said it’s like if you’re trying to buy a new car, saying: “Semi conductors are missing… queues are 6-9 months for people buying new ones, we’ve actually got 3 new 787s arriving in June that are 2 years late because of supply chain issues.”

“We’ve had to put a lot of spare aircraft in reserve which… as we get these supply chains back from Boeing and Airbus… we’ll be able to put those aircraft back in the air and that will also bring airfares down.”

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