Australian national carrier Qantas Airways, which already stopped international flights through March of 2021, has further suspended flights to the United States until at least October of 2021 due to the continued coronavirus pandemic.
To block bookings for almost another full year is a devastating blow to both countries’ tourism. Qantas normally flies to New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Honolulu and, in flights that were scheduled to begin this year, Chicago. The news was reported by Executive Traveller and the blog Simple Flying.
Now all of that is off.
Except for some repatriation and government-subsidized flights, Qantas grounded all its international flying earlier this year.
“The United States, with the level of (COVID-19) prevalence there, is probably going to take some time. It’s probably going to need a vaccine before we can see that happening,” Qantas CEO Alan Joyce previously said in a media briefing. “But countries like the United States may be among the first countries to have widespread use of any vaccine. That could mean that the United States is seen as a market (for Qantas) by the end of 2021.”
As Simple Flying noted, however, Qantas’s decision does leave the transpacific market between the United States and Australia wide open to competing airlines, particularly the North American carrier who are back on the route.
They include Delta Air Lines, American Airlines, and United Airlines all flying from the mainland U.S. and Hawaiian Airlines flying from Honolulu.
