Qantas Launching Nonstop Flights To Rome

What a surprise! QF had all along been yapping about Paris and Frankfurt and i honestly expected one of those to launch first. Very intreresting.

PER-FCO is slightly shorter than PER-CDG/FRA. Prob for the operational concerns, as well as the leisure focus.

Fabulous idea, we are checking out the seats now….we live in Darwin so flying via Perth is no big deal .Before Covid we were travelling to Milan twice a year. Rome is 3 hours from Milan by train! Well done Qantas!

Australians are a growing cruise demographic and Civitavecchia is a major port of embarkation. I wouldnt be surprised if a fair amount of this capacity was pre-sold through cruise line contracts.

I'm guessing that Qantas has put on this route as a seasonal thing for 2022. If it proves to be wildly popular they may amp up frequency.
Paris is no doubt still on the agenda (I hope!) and subject to necessary approvals, aircraft and crewing availability, may happen later in 2022.
As to 'points planes', this is prudent book-keeping as it will reduce the Liabilities ledger somewhat. As any QFF member knows, six-figure amounts of points are demanded to get you any distance out from Australia. And let's not overlook the additional 'carrier imposed charges' at a level BA would approve of!

As the CEO hinted at in the quote, Italians make up the 4th largest ancestry demographic in Australia. Way more potential VFR traffic than Paris would have

Love it!!!!! As someone who lives in Perth I look forward to taking this flight!

Australia is welcoming visitors (without quarantine) from Korea, Japan and Singapore with h no restrictions other than vaccination and a pre-flight test.

For everywhere else right now family of Australia citizens and permanent residents can visit. Students and other new temporary visa holders can enter as well.

So not fully closed to visitors, but far from fully open. There's been no formal announcement but the underlying reason as to why Japan , Korea and singapore people get to come is they have vaccination rates higher than Australia, and we have very high rates, finally . (other than diplomacy reasons, we just had the korean president here and bought some artillery)

I suspect that for the next year more countries will join the list but it will be based on vaccination rates.

Actually I am wondering if italy might be next on the list for visitors. Their Vax rate is only a percent or two behind Australia, although harder to open to one EU country and not others.

FRA is much more of a business destination, not a leisure market, and business travel is very much muted and likely to remain that way for some time. Aussies are keen to get out of the country and it makes sense for QF to add a pure leisure route particularly when travel to Asia is down significantly and likely to remain so for a while.

Strange - particularly now that Italy is a US category 4 - do not travel.

Same for the expanded AA flight to Paris on 77W - from JFK to CDG. Why expand if France is a US Cat 4 - do not travel destination?

Perhaps Qantas used the Australian government travel warming level, which is currently 'Exercise a high degree of caution', not one of the two higher levels that recommend against travel. Or perhaps the threat level today, six months before the flights begin was not considered at all.

Lol. Good luck with this. I truly do feel sorry for Qantas. Trying to operate an international airline out of Covid-hyper-panicked Australia is no easy task. At this point the new route is simply a wish list tbh.

You do realise Australia is not the US right? and that the launch date is 6 months from now?

Wasn't 72 hours of quarantine added back? And I think currently it's only NSW and Victoria and there are a number of post arrival tests as well. In the case of Singapore it seemed to be reciprocal for Australia being added as a VTL country. I would expect all these restrictions to be lifted by next summer but may be a long time before tourists feel confident Australia won't suddenly impose new restrictions.

Qantas chooses to fly to Rome because in Australia there is a huge community with italian ancestry that fly frequently to Italy for holiday to meet their (distant) relatives.
Paris is a important tourist destination but nothing more...

I'd expect that quarantine will end before the end of this summer, and can't see any way that it'll still be there in 12 months. At the moment people can quarantine at home, something that's not much of an issue as inbound travellers are almost exclusively Australian.

This a return to Rome isn’t it? I think QF flew there many years ago. Not sure when it was stopped though.

Interesting that it’s mentioned that the flight will operate “direct” I wonder where that stop will be or perhaps non- stop is what he means ?

Yes, QF flew there until 2003.

Technically it's both. It's a non-stop Perth-Rome flight, but the flight originates in Sydney so it's Sydney-Rome direct.

Remember the glory days before little Alan Joyce took over the helm? When QANTAS lived up to its old slogan - 'QANTAS - Australia's world airline', and actually flew to mainland European destinations (e.g. Rome, Paris, Frankfurt, Athens....etc etc). Pepperidge Farm remembers...

Lol. We're doing just fine down here, thanks.
Also, the demand to travel has never been higher. But thanks for your concern.

We're doing just fine down here without your sympathy mate, had to give up a few freedoms here and there, but glad to have done so to save an immense number of lives until the vaccines started flowing. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯