Qantas to cut Mumbai?
 

From The Australian:
QANTAS is considering axing its loss-making Sydney-Mumbai service after a disagreement with its pilots' union over meal allowances.

The airline will be forced to divert today's flight through Melbourne after the Australian and International Pilots Association refused to renew a concession that allows pilots to fly beyond hours outlined in their enterprise agreement.

The concession's end on Wednesday means Qantas must now change crews in Melbourne before continuing on to Mumbai instead of flying non-stop from Sydney.

However, an airline source said this would increase losses on the route and was likely to be the final straw for the service.

This could also mean new Airbus A330s slated for Qantas's mainline operations could now be sent to Jetstar and that would mean less flying for Qantas A330 pilots.

The A330 concession had been allowed to continue despite the overwhelming rejection in a pilot vote last year of a new enterprise agreement.

AIPA said pilot dissatisfaction had increased since then because meal allowances had not been updated for three years and were now significantly lower than those received by cabin crew.

Before Christmas, AIPA's executive committee decided it would not grant further concessions until the meal allowance issue was resolved.

But Qantas thinks the issue should be included in wider EBA talks.

AIPA vice-president Richard Woodward said Qantas did not help its case by waiting until the last minute before asking for an extension to the concession.

He said the airline had been told the extension for the A330s was coming up but had done nothing until the Airbus fleet manager wrote to the union on Tuesday.

"We couldn't do anything about it on such short notice and we had a committee meeting in December which decided we would give the company no more concessions against our contract until the allowances were brought up to parity with the cabin crew," he said.

Mr Woodward accused Qantas of using the allowance disagreement as a smokescreen for other reasons for pulling out of Mumbai.

Qantas began flying to Mumbai in 2004 and the service gained notoriety in 2006 when British actor Ralph Fiennes and flight attendant Lisa Robertson had sex in an A330 toilet.

It began operating the route using an A330-300 with a stopover in Darwin but moved to a non-stop service using a smaller A330-200 in an attempt to stem losses believed at that stage to be more than $20 million a year.

we know QF fly to Mumbia, I just wonder if the Indians with money actually know it too? does QF really punch hard when marketing relatively new destinations like this? ok..its a return to destination, but like the return to EZE, once the service starts you never hear any promotion or advertising for it at all.

Maybe the service will be via SIN from now on?

QF already seem to have heaps of spare A330 capapcity with cuts to:

2x weekly SYD-NRT
3x weekly MEL-NRT
3x weekly MEL-HKG (from FEB)
3x weekly SYD-HKG (from FEB)

Also once you count the delivery of the new VH-EBL its a fair bit of spare flying. Suprised they havent replaced the B763s on PER-NRT, SYD-MNL, and SYD-HNL.

Interesting times ahead!

I think it will either be via singapore, or handed over to jetstar. Yes it is an A330 destination, due to the B787 being too large. Only other way to send it would be a B763 v Singapore..

There is a large Indian population in Australia I would have though that Mumbai would have been a money spinner. As Montague said, you never see QF advertise it at all so maybe had it been better marketed it would have been a success. There seems to be a huge fascination with all things Bollywood and India being such an interesting country surely a marketing campaign would have been the go.

On a similar note, apart from the direct QF flight how would Indian passengers make it to Australia? Via Singapore?

SQ via SIN
CX via HKG
EK via DXB
etc etc

Part of the problem I think is that while it is a direct service to Mumbai, a lot of people don't want to go to Mumbai. The choice is then to either fly Qantas to BOM and connect on an Indian domestic carrier, or to fly to Singapore, and fly directly to your destination with a major international airline.

Both ways are 1 stop, but one way you fly with a premium carrier on one leg and transit in India onto a local on the other, or the other way you transit at one of the worlds premium airports and fly on an international carrier both sectors.

I know which one I'd choose :D

or KL, BKK and even HKG

I recall reading somewhere recently that part of QF's capacity cuts they were returning 2 leased A330's.

These also included parking a couple of B763's.

I dodnt recall any press release saying they were returning 332's.

I did see a release stating they had cancelled their intention to lease MORE for Jetstar