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Virgin Blue reliability slips
TRAVELCONSUMERDAILY.COM VIRGIN Blue says it is working hard to improve its poor on-time performance, which slipped dramatically in June. The airline is also leading the industry for flight cancellations, with 191 or 1.7% of its flights axed last month. On-time performance on by participating airlines (Jetstar, Qantas, QantasLink, Regional Express, Skywest Airlines, Tiger Airways and Virgin Blue) averaged 82.8% for on-time departures and 81.6% for on-time arrivals.
The long-term average performance for all routes since reporting commenced in November 2003 is 85.0% for on-time departures and 83.8% for on-time arrivals. Cancellations average 1.2% of all scheduled flights. Of the major domestic airlines, Qantas achieved the highest level of on-time departures for June 2010 at 86.9%, followed by Jetstar at 83.9%, Virgin Blue at 77.9% and Tiger Airways at 75.5%. The regional airlines were led by Regional Express at 86.2%, followed by Skywest at 85.4% and QantasLink at 83.1%. Qantas also achieved the highest on-time arrivals among the major domestic airlines at 86.0%, followed by Jetstar at 83.0%, Virgin Blue at 78.5% and Tiger Airways at 76.6%. Skywest was the best performing regional airline for on time arrivals at 86.1%, followed by Regional Express at 81.8% and QantasLink at 80.1%. Virgin Blue had the highest percentage of cancellations for June 2010 at 1.7%, while Regional Express had the lowest percentage of cancellations at 0.5%. “Improving on-time performance is a priority of the highest importance to the whole team at Virgin Blue,” the airline said in a statement today. "A range of actions are underway, with a specific focus on improving practices and performance in areas of our operation which have a direct impact on OTP, including airport operations, our schedule and aircraft reliability. "The fact is, we have significantly more flight sectors in our schedule than the other airlines and this means any disruption to operations can have more wide-reaching flow-on impacts for us than it does for the others. We are working to redress this situation. "We had 1432 more flights scheduled in June than QF; 7721 more than JQ and 9785 more than Tiger – so looked at in that way, we are talking about operations of a completely different scale. "Our aim is to always minimise disruptions to our guests across the network. So when we need to cancel flights our main aim is to cause as little disruption to our guests as we can and, wherever possible, we contact guests before they go to the airport to offer alternative flight options, and thereby minimise inconvenience." Comment on this article |
Cancellations represented 1.1% of all scheduled flights. The equivalent figures for June 2009 were 81.% for departures, 80.5% for arrivals and 1.5% for cancellations.