ON-TIME-PERFORMANCE: The war on punctuality performance—Qantas v Virgin Australia

For some time, Australia’s domestic airlines have been fighting over the prize for the most reliable on-time performance. This week, however, the war has come to an absurd conclusion (I wish that were the end!) with warring press releases from Australia’s two major domestic airlines: Qantas Group and Virgin Australia.

Statistics — which statement is true?

Each month the Bureau of Infrastructure and Transport Research Economics (BITRE) releases on-time-performance data. Qantas and Virgin Australia public relations departments both seem to specialise in the dark arts of selective facts.

On 22 January, Qantas released a media statement that, according to ‘Government data’:

Qantas has continued to improve its operational performance, again finishing the year as the most on time major domestic airline.

QANTAS THE MOST ON TIME DOMESTIC AIRLINE FOR 2024, Media Release, Qantas, 22 January 2025

Today, 29 January, a week later, Virgin Australia has released a media statement claiming :

Virgin Australia was the country’s most punctual and reliable major airline in December.

Virgin Australia tops reliability podium as passenger numbers soar, Virgin Australia, 29 January 2025

Answer — they both are

What’s absurd is that both statements are correct. In December 2024, Virgin Australia was the most punctual and reliable major airline, and Qantas was the most on-time domestic airline for the whole of 2024.

The thing is, you need to drill down into the specifics of these statements.

Virgin Australia

First, Virgin Australia is only making a claim for December, not the whole of 2024. For that period, it flew 99.4% of its scheduled domestic flights, which is about 400 flights per day. However, only 74.4% of flights departed on time.

What is really alarming is that 27 of the 31 days in the month saw cancelled flights. Or, in CEO Jayne Hrdicka’s positive spin:

“What is also great is that our on-time performance improved by 18.5 percentage points from December 2023 to December 2024.”

Virgin Australia CEO Jayne Hrdicka

Qantas

Australia’s largest domestic airline does a couple of things. Qantas makes its claim for the whole of 2024, not just December. It also adds statistics on its full-service regional brand, QantasLink, to improve its figures.

Qantas also slices and dices the figures differently so it can support claims of being the best performer for ‘five years in a row’ without specifying which years they are. It also claims to have beaten its competitor for on-time performance in 10 out of the last 12 months.

Qantas admits that its performance in December was only 73.1%, less than that of Virgin Australia.

“We are pleased that we continued to see year-on-year improvement in our operational performance but there is still more work to do as it’s still not back at the levels that we are targeting.”

Markus Svensson, Qantas Domestic CEO

What BITRE statistics say

BITRE statistics for 2024 show the following performance running in these ranges from best to worst:

1. Alliance, Airnorth etc = 80-90%
2. REX Airlines = 85-90%
3. Qantas = 80-85%
4. Jetstar = 75-80%
5. Virgin Australia = 75-80%

Chat GPT tells me that domestic airlines’ on-time performance (OTP) is typically between 80 and 85% in the USA. In Europe, OTP is 75-85%. For Canada, it’s close to the USA’s performance of 80 to 85%.

2PAXfly Takeout

What’s that saying? How do you tell when teenagers are lying? Answer: when they open their mouths. The same is valid for airlines and their media statements.