IT HAD LEFT BECAUSE
Qantas had pulled out of China in 2001 as it mustered its resources to cope with the collapse of Ansett and because yields on the route were thin.
IT CAME BACK BECAUSE
Lot of business traffic from Shanghai, a more than doubling of Chinese visiting to Australia.
WHY VIABLE NOW
The use of the more efficient and cost-effective A330s
I PERSONALLY FEEL
QANTAS intends to use this new service to Shanghai to expand into China & ultimately start through services to destinations such as Europe.
Qantas Airlines executive general manager John Borghetti said after the official launch in Shanghai yesterday of the carrier's three times weekly service from Sydney that the airline was keen to add more flights to the Chinese financial centre and to expand to other Chinese destinations, with Beijing first in line.
"Under the Qantas brand we have a definitive strategy of saying, let's get three flights up to five flights to Shanghai very quickly, and quickly to seven if we can, and then operate through," Mr Borghetti said.
"Then there's another strategy that says, what other points in China can we serve, when can we do it and with what. Obviously, at some point between now and the Olympics, probably sooner rather than later, you're going to go to Beijing. The question is which airline do you use? Is it Australian or Qantas?"
Qantas has singled out China and India as major growth markets and its Singapore-based joint venture, Jetstar Asia, is also starting services to Shanghai.
Last week's launch in Shanghai - spearheaded by Mr Borghetti, Qantas chairman Margaret Jackson and Olympic champion Ian Thorpe - was welcomed by Chinese officials as a move that would improve tourism, trade and relations between the two countries.
Mr Borghetti said there were no issues with Qantas rights to fly from Australia to China, where the airline also code-shared with China Eastern, or with rights to fly from China.
There were still problems with rights to some European destinations such as London.
"But Hong Kong, Shanghai, India sometime in the next five years are really going to have to be through runs to UK-Europe because the market is no longer a simple Australia run - it's much more complex than that," Mr Borghetti said.
The Qantas executive also said the carrier would review its fuel surcharge if oil prices continued to drop and stayed low. Oil prices last week dropped to their lowest level in almost three months after the US revealed bigger than expected stockpiles and OPEC said it would allow member states to keep pumping above official quotas if prices remained high.
"What we've seen, of course, in the last few weeks is the oil going down and then it very quickly comes back up, so we're watching them very carefully," Mr Borghetti said.
"We said we'd take the surcharges off or lower them as things changed if they changed, but you can't make a call on just two days because it's very volatile."