Qantas and Emirates have signed a ten year deal to cooperate and collaborate on pricing, sales, codesharing and scheduling.
For Qantas – the knight in shining armour has arrived to help turn around its international division which has been suffering from low demand and increased fuel prices.
Whilst there will be no equity investment from either side into the project, there will be some big impacts from the project
- The Qantas hub at Singapore will slowly be dismantled in favour of a hub at Dubai (replacing the Kangaroo hop with the Falcon Hop)
- Emriates will pick up traffic from Dubai to European destinations, allowing more codeshare traffic, whilst Qantas gets connecting traffic to Australia Domestic and Trans-Tasmainan network
- Frankfurt will cease being a Qantas destination of any sort
- The Joint Business Venture with British Airways (who cooperate on the London > Bangkok/Singapore > Sydney route) will cease from 31st March 2013 (however Oneworld alliance agreements remain in place).
- The Qantas Asia routes will no longer be dependant on the Kangaroo route and will be “free to grow” at their own needs
For Frequent Flyers, an interesting titbit is that the Emirates and Qantas Frequent Flyer programmes will be linked , to provide:
“reciprocal access to tier status benefits which includes end-to-end recognition of customers, lounge access, priority check-in and boarding and more”.
The two airlines operate a total 98 weekly services between Australia and Dubai, including four daily A380 flights, with the trunk route of London > Dubai > Sydney/Melbourne will offer a combined frequency of 7 flights a day.
Baggage policies will remain the same, operating from common terminals in Sydney, Melbourne, Dubai and London
Emirates is happy with the deal, but will not be changing its current stance regarding joining one of the three major alliances – preferring to work in partnership with an airline
It’s going to be interesting how this plays out over the next few years and the impact of this – least of all the remaining players on the Kangaroo route (British Airways and Virgin Atlantic) and what they’ll do next – because in all seriousness I don’t honestly think the BA route will hang around much longer after the 31st March 2013…
Good to see some coverage of this relatively big news (for Australians at least). While I’m not surprised it hasn’t really rated a mention in the US-centric blogs, it would have been nice for at least a mention. If this was a US airline doing the same thing, there would be weeks of analysis.
Coming from Perth, we lose our direct QF flights to LHR, but I’m excited by the possibilities of one-stop connections into Europe on EK.
I have seen plenty of blog posts about this.
Head over to CAPA and look for the article on this partnership, it is a solid read with more information than you will know what to do with.