For personal reasons, I will need to travel twice to Brisbane in the coming month and although I’ve booked both trips well in advance, my credit card is still smoking from the heavy payments.
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I’m not alone in finding airline fares to be the biggest difficulty in living in Mount Isa and it’s been a problem that has been long documented and much complained about, mostly without success.
Neither Qantas nor Virgin have much incentive to offer cheaper flights but maybe they can be shamed into better service.
That seems to be the message from Kyle Keighery’s Facebook post (see story on page 6) which went viral this week.
Mr Keighery, a Mount Isa resident, was attempting to book a flight from Mount Isa to Townsville and found that the cheapest fare on offer was $850 and noted that an international flight to Phuket, Bali or Los Angeles would be cheaper (of course, you’d have to get to the capital city in the first place but it’s a valid point).
Mr Keighery is hardly the first person to have made this point but what seems to have resonated is his depiction of Qantas’s slogan “the spirit of Australia” as “the spirit of ripping people off.”
Mr Keighery’s noted that the fares didn’t show much spirit and instead made it near impossible for families to remain connected.
Not surprisingly his comment to the Qantas page went viral with more than 400 comments and 500 shares.
A Qantas spokesperson was quick to respond that it regularly offered sale fares on routes across outback Queensland including fares between Mount Isa and Townsville starting at $199.
But event that person had to admit it was not always practical to book early enough to get that type of fare.
Mount Isa state MP Robbie Katter noted that Mr Keighery’s post came just days after Qantas announced massive profits and was offering its CEO Alan Joyce a salary of $13 million.
The Mount Isa – Townsville route was one of the routes looked at in the Department of Transport and Main Roads review of government-supported long distance passenger transport services in regional Queensland last year but there remains no subsidy no place. DB