Emirates, the A380 champion, will be halting its daily services between Sydney and Auckland come 31 July 2017.
Qantas on the other hand will be switching their four daily Sydney-Auckland services – QF140/146 and QF143/149 – to the Airbus A330s from the B737s. The A330s will feature Qantas latest business class seats. Read the MEL-SIN business class review here.
The affected Emirates A380s flights are EK418 from Sydney to Auckland and EK419 from Auckland back to Sydney. Passengers booked on these flights will be rebooked onto Qantas flights QF143 and QF146, which will run daily from 13 July.
The QF schedule between Sydney and Auckland are shown below. However, those marked by the red ‘stars’ are operated by the B737s rather than the A330s.
Emirates’ have three other trans-Tasman A380 routes and fortunately, they are not affected.
Sydney-Christchurch, Melbourne-Auckland and Brisbane-Auckland.
With this new arrangement, it will be interesting to see how the fares are going to work out. I flown Emirates from Singapore to Auckland via Brisbane for about A$750 two years ago. I was able to stopover in Brisbane for 3 days to visit my relatives. A direct flight from Singapore to Auckland at that time costs me nearly A$1300. Because of the capacity that Emirates has on the SIN – BNE – AKL route, fares were extremely competitive.
For instance, a SIN – BNE would costs nearly the same as the SIN – AKL (via BNE) fares on the same carrier. Hence, the ‘layover’ cities routes are favourable to travellers like me with families straddling across these two countries.
Emirates has been actively re-strategising their routes. As much as being beneficial to the company and the shareholders as a whole but from a consumer point of view, I would not be able to take advantage of the (usually) cheaper alternatives offered by airlines on ‘layover’ routes anymore.