Good news for Brisbane based skiers and boarders next season.
Qantas will begin direct flights from Brisbane to Tokyo’s Narita Airport from August next year as part of the airline’s expansion of services into Japan.
This new direct service will operate four times a week and complement a new direct daily Sydney-Haneda service.
Fares for the new Brisbane-Narita service and Sydney-Haneda service will be available for sale progressively from later this week, for travel from 1 August 2015 and 31 July 2015 respectively.
To celebrate the launch of non-stop services between Brisbane and Narita, Qantas will be offering sale fares starting from $899 return from 12 December to 22 December 2014 for travel from 1 August 2015.
Qantas will also fly to Narita on three alternate days from another Australian port, which will be finalised shortly, meaning the airline will offer double daily services to Japan.
In total, Qantas will add more than 4,000 seats per week across 14 return flights between Australia and Japan on a combination of B747 (to Haneda) and A330 (to Narita) services.
The announcement was made at Qantas’ Brisbane Heavy Maintenance Facility where Qantas Group CEO Alan Joyce and Queensland Premier Campbell Newman inspected work on the first of 28 Airbus A330s to be fitted with new class-leading interiors.
It follows Qantas’ recent confirmation that it had obtained peak time slots to operate daily services to Tokyo’s Haneda Airport in addition to its existing slots to Narita. The extra capacity comes as departures from Australia to Japan have grown 17 per cent in the past year.
The extra flying time has been made possible through improved aircraft utilisation.
Mr Joyce said the new direct service from Brisbane to Japan was a coup for Australian travellers as well as for the local economy.
“We are delighted to offer Qantas customers a choice of four weekly services from Brisbane to Tokyo beginning in August next year,” Mr Joyce said.
“This is great news for Brisbane customers wanting to visit Japan but it’s also great news for tourism because it makes Queensland even more accessible to Japanese travellers.
“We expect the Sydney to Haneda services to be particularly popular with business travellers, and this traffic is likely to keep growing off the back of the Free Trade Agreement between Australia and Japan.
“Combined with Jetstar flights from Cairns and the Gold Coast into Japan, the services the Qantas Group offers put us in a very strong position when it comes to both leisure and premium travel to the world’s third largest economy.”
Mr Joyce said the A330s flying to Narita will be among those gradually refurbished with all new lie-flat Business Suites, upgraded Economy seating and new in-flight entertainment.
“We’re proud to be doing work on our A330s in Brisbane, where we have more than 200 engineers and support staff working for 30 days on each aircraft to install 250,000 individual parts,” he said.
“When this project is finished by the end of 2016, we believe these aircraft will offer the best travel experience between Australia and Asia, and the best domestic travel experience anywhere in the world.”
The first of Qantas’ newly refurbished A330 aircraft will start flying domestically in late December, with the first route to be Sydney to Perth. The first international reconfigured aircraft due to enter service in mid-January on the Melbourne to Singapore route. More than half of the A330 fleet is expected to be refurbished by the end of December 2015.
