Sun ready to rise again on Qantas first-class services

Qantas has given hope to frequent flyers promising lower fares and the best first class product in the world when the COVID crisis eases.

A refurbished Qantas A380 – the superjumbos are now in storage in the Mojave Desert waiting out the COVID crisis.

Qantas CEO Alan Joyce has given frequent flyers a good reason to hoard their points, promising the best first-class product of any airline when much anticipated Project Sunrise flights finally taken off.

Currently on hold due to the COVID-19 crisis, Project Sunrise is the name Qantas has given its proposed non-stop services between Australia’s east coast and cities including New York and London.

Airbus A350-1000s are expected to operate on the routes in a four-class cabin configuration to give passengers maximum comfort on the 20-hour plus flights.

Mr Joyce revealed his commitment to the project at Friday’s virtual AGM, and also made several references to the prospect of lower fares when flying took off again.

“We think in a post-COVID world the business opportunities for those (direct) routes would be quite immense and we do think there is an opportunity for us to increase our international market share coming out of this,” he said.

He said Qantas was committed to a first-class product on the A350-1000s expected to fly the ultra-long-range routes that would be superior to anything else on the market.

With Qantas’s Boeing 747s now retired and A380s in long-term storage, there has been concerns first class could have been relegated to the history books by Qantas.

Mr Joyce said one of the A380s in storage in the Mojave Desert had been flown straight from Germany where it had just undergone a cabin makeover.

He remained adamant the superjumbos would fly again for Qantas “when demand returned” although it was unclear when that might be.

While travel bubbles with countries such as New Zealand, Fiji, Singapore, Japan and Korea could see some level of international flights next year, services to the US and the UK were not expected until late 2021. “It’s going to need a vaccine (to reopen those markets) due to the high prevalence of the virus at both of those locations,” said Mr Joyce. “But we are getting more and more confident about the opportunities and the potential for a vaccine.”

As for passengers left seriously out of pocket by the mass cancellation of international flights in 2020, Mr Joyce offered an earnest apology. “I don’t think any airline was set up to see the level of cancellations, the level of customer bookings we’ve had to refund,” he told the AGM.

“We’ve tried to do it in stages to ensure we don’t have an overwhelming deluge into our call centres.”