Overseas airlines reluctant to sell Australian flights

International airlines are not rushing to follow Qantas in opening up flights to and from Australia until they get more information.

A Singapore Airlines plane landing in Melbourne. Picture: David Crosling

International airlines operating to Australia say they need more information before they can sell seats on flights ahead of Nov­ember’s reopening of national borders.

While Qantas wasted no time launching the sale of flights to the US and Britain from November 14, carriers like Emirates, Qatar, Etihad, Cathay Pacific and Singapore Airlines were more cautious.

Board of Airline Representatives of Australia executive director Barry Abrams said that was because they were still seeking clarification on several issues, including caps on unvaccinated travellers.

He said it was reasonable to think a proportion of the 48,000 Australians still stranded overseas were not vaccinated and would still require mandatory hotel quarantine on arrival.

Until airlines knew how many unvaccinated passengers they could carry into the country, it would be difficult to start taking bookings.

“There is no facility in the global ticketing system to determine what bookings come from unvaccinated travellers, as opposed to vaccinated,” said Mr Abrams.

“The difficulty airlines have is that if they sell 200 seats for a flight, they may have to inform some of those people upon check-in that they’re not eligible to fly if they’re restricted to, say, 20 unvaccinated passengers.”

A series of questions had been put to the federal government in response to last Friday’s announcement, but BARA was yet to receive a response.

They included queries about who would decide on what was an accepted medical exemption for an unvaccinated person, and what the vaccine-verification requirements for airlines would look like.

Mr Abrams said they also needed to know what was the process for a fully vaccinated passenger who returned a positive Covid test prior to departure.

“If the Australian and state governments resolve these basic issues around ticketing, airlines can quickly start selling tickets,” he said.

“The government needs to come up with a set of workable ­arrangements that fit in with how global ticketing systems work.”

One solution was to operate a combination of green and red flights to allow airlines to fill some services with fully vaccinated passengers, and others with capped numbers of the unvaccinated.

Singapore Airlines regional vice-president Louis Arul said it would make further announcements about scheduled passenger operations to Australia once it had more clarity on operational matters, such as arrival passenger caps and requirements.

“We remain committed to working with all levels of government and airport authorities to develop the detailed plans for travel to resume in a safe, sustainable and scalable manner,” Mr Arul said.

Flight Centre chief executive Graham Turner said it was always good to have more detail from governments about procedural changes but he was confident airlines and airports would “work it out pretty quickly”.

“From what I’ve seen travelling over the last few months, if the government doesn’t give airports and airlines clear guidelines, they work it out for themselves,” Mr Turner said.

“The main thing is for governments to allow domestic and international borders to reopen.”

He predicted it would take between three and six months before international travel was operating seamlessly, and another two to three years before capacity returned to pre-Covid levels.