Qantas has raised a series of concerns about the proposed Air New Zealand-Virgin Australia alliance, urging regulators to test claims about how it will benefit travellers.
“While the Qantas Group does not object to the application, we are concerned by some of the factual inaccuracies and inconsistencies it contains,” says the submission to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission from Cam Wallace, QF’s head of international and freight.
Because of the proposed alliance, QF has decided to end its codeshare with NZ after eight years. This will mean that from early Apr next year, NZ customers will lose access to 85 codeshare routes on the QF network.
More than 40% of these routes and 26 destinations are not served by VA, QF says in the submission. Both QF and NZ customers will lose the ability to earn and redeem points on the other carrier’s flights, and they will also lose access to lounges.
Despite the applicants’ claims, these are clearly significant consumer losses from the proposed alliance, states QF.
. . . Scale Questions
The proposed NZ/VA alliance includes each airline’s total network and reciprocal earning of points, lounge access and other perks.
The QF submission takes issue with how its size is characterised, ‘yet skims over the combined market share of the applicants’.
The suggestion that QF constrains NZ in the Kiwi domestic market is ‘not supported by any evidence’, says QF’s submission which points out that NZ has a 76.2% share, compared to Jetstar’s 22.8%. NZ’s share of the corporate market out of Australia is also understated, it says. QF is calling for NZ/VA’s claim that the alliance will not deter VA from operating more of its planes on the Tasman to be ‘carefully scrutinised’. QF urges the ACCC to question whether VA can continue to adequately ringfence Queenstown from other parts of the alliance’s network.
