Restored Beijing link a winner for Qantas

Bookings for restored daily Qantas flights between Sydney and Beijing are already booming ahead.

Qantas chief Alan Joyce announces the Beijing flights. Picture: John Feder

Bookings for restored daily ­Qantas flights between Sydney and Beijing are already booming, in line with the growing business and tourism links between the countries.

Numbers of passengers making forward reservations for the service that began on Wednesday are already running at 80 per cent or more for the next few months — similar to flights between Sydney and Shanghai.

Chief executive Alan Joyce, who arrived on the first Airbus A330-200 flight, said in Beijing yesterday that “it’s the perfect time” for the flights — halted in 2009 in the wake of the global ­financial crisis — to begin again.

Mr Joyce said the year-old free-trade agreement between the countries was now “hitting its stride”, fostering more business travel, and that Chinese tourism into Australia was rising rapidly, with visitor numbers up 23 per cent last financial year to 1.16 million, spending $9 billion.

Besides this increased demand, “our cost base is a lot lower”, he said. “We have taken out more than $2bn costs over the last two years.”

The freight market is also enjoying a surge.

For instance, dedicated 767-300 freighter flights will soon start to transport more than 50,000 litres of fresh milk, produced by VAN dairy, every week from Hobart to Ningbo near Shanghai.

Distributors will then truck the milk to supermarkets and convenience stores in eastern China, and as far north as Beijing.

The new route to Beijing adds 18 per cent to the airline’s total passenger capacity into China including Hong Kong, now operating 42 return flights a week.

The first regular Qantas flights to Hong Kong were in 1949, via a DC4.

In 1973, it became the first Western airline to land in Beijing under the People’s Republic, carrying prime minister Gough Whitlam in a Boeing 707.

Beijing has become the 11th largest market in the world for corporate travel, Mr Joyce said, while Shanghai is in the top 10.

He said that Qantas had been increasingly told by Australian business, cultural and political leaders how valuable it would be for them to be able to fly directly in to Beijing, avoiding spending a lot of time in transit at other airports.

“They’ve been crying out for this for a long time,” he said, stressing that Qantas was able to realise the benefits of being perceived as a premium, safe brand — succeeding in selling $650 economy class seats while Air China charges just $350.

Subsidiary Jetstar also provides more than 30 return flights a week to eight Chinese cities, from Singapore and Vietnam, and between the Gold Coast and Wuhan. Such flights service second-tier and third-tier cities where the leisure market outweighs business travel, Mr Joyce said.

Gareth Evans, international and freight chief executive for Qantas, said that “while groups still form a very significant part of inbound travel” from China, “free and independent travellers are growing considerably, as the demographic changes”.

He said that Qantas was seeking to increase its payment platforms in China from Union Pays to include Alipay and the increasingly dominant WeChat.

All these platforms are already available, though, to customers who book through Qantas’s joint venture partner in the country, China Eastern.

Every Qantas flight between Sydney and Beijing will be in a Qantas plane, while some on the code-shared Shanghai route are being flown by China Eastern — though this is clearly flagged, Mr Evans said.

“The power of partnership” was proving highly valuable for the Chinese market, he said.