Business travel remains strong despite cancellations: Flight Centre
Flight Centre boss Graham Turner says domestic business travel is strong despite ongoing cancellation issues includingmore than 100 cancelled flights at Sydney Airport over the weekend as the school holidays began.
Thirty-seven domestic flights to and from Sydney Airport were cancelled on Monday as of 3pm, along with 31 flights to and from Brisbane.
Flight Centre chief executive Graham Turner says business travel remains strong despite heavy flight cancellations. Madeline Begley
Brisbane Airport Corporation public affairs head Stephen Beckett said while repairs had to be conducted on two sections of the legacy runway after defects were found during a routine inspection, it was reopened by 2.30pm in time for the afternoon peak. The runway had been out of action for 7.5 hours.
This came after more than 100 flights to and from Sydney were cancelled on Friday, with 43 domestic flights cancelled on both Saturday and Sunday as strong winds temporarily reduced the airport to a single runway.
Mr Turner said business travel had returned to pre-pandemic levels while leisure travel lagged slightly behind at about 80 per cent.
“Business people are still travelling. Prices are higher, but they need to meet eye-to-eye. That remains really important to getting serious business or sales done,” he told The Australian Financial Review.
Around 74 per cent of flights across airlines departed and arrived on time in May, up 10 percentage points on last May when the aviation industry was in acustomer service crisis. Cancellations also roughly halved, sitting at 3 per cent last month.
This was still worse than long-term averages of around 82 per cent for on-time flights, however. Cancellations on popular routes such as Canberra-Sydney and
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