Qantas beats Virgin to start Beijing flights in January

Qantas will return to Beijing after a seven-year gap, with a headstart over Virgin Australia in the China market.

‘We are very proud to be back in Beijing’: Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce with a dragon friend on the tarmac at Sydney Airport yesterday. Picture Renee Nowytarger

Qantas is returning to Beijing after a seven-year gap as the nation’s No 1 airline draws new battle lines with rival Virgin Australia to cash in on China’s burgeoning and travel-hungry middle classes.

The airline will begin daily flights between Sydney and Beijing from January — its first flights to the Chinese capital since the global financial crisis hit — as it moves to take advantage of record number of Chinese tourists visiting Australia.

Tourism figures out this week showed that more than 1.1 million Chinese visited Australia last year, nearly double the number of British or US tourists, and an increase of 22.5 per cent on the previous year.

By next year China is expected to overtake New Zealand as Australia’s largest international tourism market, according to Austrade.

“One of every four visitors to Australia is now Chinese. So we are really well-positioned to take advantage of that, and this is the latest step in Qantas’s strategy to take full advantage of the Asian growth and tourism opportunities for Australia,” Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce said.

“Flying to the Chinese capital is a major moment and a significant event for us as a carrier. We are very proud to be back in Beijing, and think this service will be amazing and the jewel in the crown of the Qantas network.”

Qantas’s imminent return to Beijing steals the march on Virgin Australia which has been very bullish on the prospects of China and has plans to launch services to Beijing and Hong Kong by next June to help boost revenues in its international business. Earlier this year, Virgin chief John Borghetti said the airline’s strategy to crack into the lucrative Chinese travel market was superior to Qantas’s and would give the carrier a “huge” competitive edge over its cashed-up rival.

But the manoeuvres by Mr Joyce and his team mean the Flying Kangaroo will have at least a six-month headstart before its rival lands in Beijing.

“This has nothing to do with what Virgin is doing. We always play our own game, we have the best international network, the best domestic network and the best regional network,” Mr Joyce said.

Qantas will operate an Airbus A330 into Beijing Capital International Airport with return flights connecting with its domestic and trans-Tasman networks.

Qantas — which already offers flights into Shanghai and Hong Kong — will also expands on its partnership with China Eastern by codesharing on Sydney-Hangzhou, Sydney-Kunming and Brisbane-Shanghai routes.

The new route will depart Sydney at 1:50pm and land in Beijing at 10:40pm. The return flight will depart just after midnight and land in Sydney at 2:55pm.

Mr Joyce said that without China Eastern’s help, Qantas would not have been able to make the route possible.

“Beijing and Shanghai are very full so other carriers that get these slots are in the middle of the night. So we have done very well to get this operations running at good times,” he said.

The Sydney-Beijing flight will result in an 18 per cent increase in Qantas’s capacity to greater China, or about 3300 seats a week. More than 50 per cent of Qantas’s capacity now flies into Asia.