21 March 2025
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I am currently in Paris, on business, and when Parisians learn we are not the despised English, they welcome us with “such a long way!” And it is with basically a day given up for an European holiday and there is a feeling that airlines are ripping us off.
And they can because we don’t have a real lot of competition in the market and the ones that are here all play, what looks like, a price collusion game.
That is, they look at what Qantas charges and set a price on par or just below, but the bottom line is we pay a lot, compared to other world travellers.
The following numbers show how addicted we are to OS travel and that addiction, which economists called inelasticity of demand, means as the price goes up, we actually give the price riser more of our money! As Homer Simpson might say: “Doh!”
I think these numbers prove we are addicted OS travellers: “Approximately 7.27 million Australian residents travelled from Australian overseas in the year ended June 2023, up from 1.39 million in the previous year,” the ABS tells us.
And so, it is great interest that we learn that Turkish Airlines will fly from Sydney to Istanbul four times a week via Kuala Lumpur from December 5. The airline already flies out of Melbourne three times a week via Singapore, but it's the first time it will fly out of Sydney.
The airline’s press release says it “flies to more countries than any other, covering 130 destinations with connecting flights to 340 cities.”
Here’s a fact provided by 9news.com.au that surprised me: “Turkish Airlines is now the second European Airline to fly to Australia, aside from British Airways, after all other major European airlines pulled out years ago. The addition could bring down ticket prices because of more competition in the market.”
In effect, the only value a new airline can bring is to generate price competition and it should be something the Federal Government and the ACCC should be committed to achieving, given 30% of us spend money on this big outlay every year.
And since Covid we have been ripped off to the tune of 29% in money terms ticket-price wise and 13% in real terms in the year 2022-23 and that’s after a 13% fall in prices!
That’s why a new entrant to the airline game has to offer a better deal for travellers or else it’s a so what story. That said, 9news.com.au says “the deal could generate more than $53 million in visitor spending in Sydney, according to Destination NSW and an estimated 290 new jobs but it’s lower prices we want and we want them ASAP!
By the way, according to SKYTRAX here are the top 10 airlines in the world for 2024:
Note who is not on the list? Qantas!
