Last year we did an analysis of Qantas’s decision to reroute its New York flights through Auckland, replacing their historic Los Angeles-New York tag-on flight. The analysis highlighted how Auckland serves as a better hub than Los Angeles for Qantas, generating more one-stop city pairs while simultaneously improving the transit experience.
Early data showed Qantas enjoying relatively early success with strong load factors. Interestingly, data also shows that a growing majority of passengers weren’t originating at Sydney, rather originating or connecting at Auckland.
Furthermore, Qantas’s success was having a meaningful impact on Air New Zealand’s performance on the Auckland-New York route with load factors weakening significantly after Qantas’s entry. We’ve since written on Air New Zealand’s long haul fleet challenges, raising serious questions regarding the allocation of scarce capacity on such a long and relatively underperforming route.
Why revisit now?
Why is now a good time to check in on Auckland-New York? Are 10 months of additional data that much more interesting?
We were provoked by recent comments from Scott Zeglin, Qantas’s Head of Commercial Strategy and Performance that Qantas intended to maintain the one-stop Auckland-New York route alongside the non-stop Project Sunrise flight from Sydney (presumably) to New York that’s due to begin in 2027.
In the depth of his comments, Zeglin noted that “Auckland has worked well as a hub”, which reinforces the argument we made last year that it generates strong network opportunities given Qantas and Jetstar 6 Australian and 4 New Zealand points that feed into Auckland.
Even then, the performance must be really good from a network perspective for Qantas to want to maintain the flight once non-stop services to New York begin in 2027, so let’s reassess the data.