Chart of the week #13: What proportion of Australia-UK travel flies direct?

Following up on last week’s “chart of the week”, we’re considering an interesting question: what proportion of Australia-UK travel flies direct?

There are some technicalities to this question as most travel between Australia and the UK doesn’t go non-stop. This wasn’t even possible until Qantas introduced their non-stop Perth-London flight in 2018. Just to clarify, direct doesn’t mean non-stop, but instead means the same flight, i.e. with the same aircraft and/or flight number, between origin and destination. For example, taking QF1 from Sydney to London via Singapore is a direct flight, as is taking QF9 from Perth to London (non-stop is direct, although direct isn’t non-stop). However, taking QF 35 Melbourne to Singapore and then connecting to QF1 from Singapore to London, or taking Emirates via Dubai is not direct, but rather a transit flight.

At present, direct flights between Australia and the UK are operated by British Airways and Qantas, while Virgin Atlantic operated the route until 2014. As last week’s “chart of the week” showed, capacity on direct services has declined significantly since its peak in 2007 as BA and Qantas withdrew capacity. We argued that this should “not be interpreted to mean that travel between Australia and the UK has declined since 2017. In fact, the opposite is true as a greater share of passengers are traveling via transit hubs.”

So how can we go about estimating this? Actually, it’s quite simple! We take the monthly ABS arrivals data and combine Australian residents returning from the UK with visitors arriving from the UK, and then estimate the difference between that total and passenger arrivals on direct flights from the UK (from BITRE data). There are a number of confounders that this doesn’t account for, but it’s an estimate nonetheless (note: analysis limited in time to 2008 as ABS data isn’t available prior to that).

These data confirm our argument from last week that Australia-UK passenger numbers continued to increase, despite the loss of direct capacity. However, the proportion of passengers traveling via transit hubs like Dubai and Singapore increased dramatically, increasing from 36% in 2008 to 73% in 2019. Direct flights have increased in popularity since the COVID-19 pandemic, increasing from 27% in 2019 to 34% in 2023.

There was a lot of speculation in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic that non-stop travel would become more popular, although these data shouldn’t be interpreted as supporting that as several major stopover points have seen capacity severely limited since the pandemic (e.g. Hong Kong).

We’d expect these data to continue evolving in the future as Qantas’s Project Sunrise looks to return significant capacity to London with non-stop flights from Sydney and Melbourne. It’s likely that non-stop flights will operate in addition to the existing direct and non-stop services. Some may question where Qantas will get the Heathrow slots, but they have two additional daily slot pairs leased out to BA!

This doesn’t mean the proportion of direct flights will increase, as continued growth in passengers numbers may increase the denominator just as quickly!

In case you missed it, here is last week’s “chart of the week”! Thanks for reading and remember to subscribe and share!