Qantas and Jetstar are preparing to fly almost 350,000 customers across Australia over the next four days, with Victoria, Queensland and the Northern Territory starting school holidays this weekend.
Qantas and Jetstar have been pulling out all stops and working with airports and suppliers to ensure the upcoming holiday period is not impacted by the significant disruptions that customers faced over Easter with long queues for security screening and delayed baggage.
Since April, Qantas and Jetstar have recruited more than 1000 operational team members, including cabin crew, airport customer service, pilots and engineers. Hundreds of additional contact centre staff have helped reduce Qantas' average call wait times to below pre-COVID levels.
Compared to Easter, Qantas has 20 per cent more team members on standby rosters to minimise any impact of sick leave or COVID-isolation requirements and its ground handling suppliers have 15 per cent more employees.
The airlines have also:
- Deployed extra staff to assist at check-in and manage queues.
- Made operational changes to improve on time performance, such as more dual door boarding to get customers on and off aircraft quicker and spreading flight departure times to ease congestion.
- Put several hundred corporate head office team members on standby to help in baggage areas and check in at Sydney and Melbourne airports should they be required.
- Qantas has started rolling out new check-in and baggage kiosks, starting in Sydney, to speed up customers' journey.
- Qantas has two additional widebody aircraft on reserve to assist if required.
School holidays start in NSW, WA and the ACT next weekend, while SA and Tasmania start on 9 July.
As holiday makers prepare for their trips, Qantas and Jetstar are reminding travellers to check-in online and arrive at the airport around two hours ahead of their scheduled departure time.
The most popular domestic destinations for travellers these holidays include Cairns, Perth, Gold Coast and the Sunshine Coast. Internationally, flights to London, Rome, the United States, Bali and Queenstown are extremely popular.
