The Qantas itch Virgin will never scratch

The thing about writing a book is that you need to become 10 times more obsessed with that subject than any other person. Nowadays, whenever I write an article about Qantas, or aviation generally, there's a nagging fear that nobody else gives a f— about whatever technical minutiae I'm fulminating about. Rampart subscribers may even wish to inform me that this fear is not misplaced!

It's nevertheless important to put companies on notice that their petit sleights are being seen, and that's all I was seeking to do with my Qantas article on Friday, even if, quite obviously, an $8 million underlying profit adjustment was not the biggest take-out from its $1.3 billion interim profit. 

A much bigger take-out is that – barring any profound demand shift in the economy – Qantas appears able to maintain both its enviable profitability and, simultaneously, its enormous capex program. And for all the damage he did, Alan Joyce deserves the lion's share of the credit for that. 

I was also surprised that there's been no real media interest in the COVID flight credits class action apparently being on the brink of a settlement and another liability for Qantas shareholders in the tens of millions of dollars.

I said in Friday's piece that Virgin Australia had become the worse airline actor in terms of dubious underlying earnings accounting, though that mantle seems to change more frequently than the winner in monthly domestic on-time performance. Virgin's underlying first-half profit of $399 million, revealed on Friday, was boosted by $24 million of "IT transformation" and "restructuring and transformation" costs but also muddied by foreign exchange fluctuations. As per Friday's piece, expensing this stuff below the line really gives investors the shits.

The other newsworthy element of the airlines' profit season was, as usual, the latest loyalty enticements for their customers. I won't dwell here on the latest "enhancements" made to the frequent flyer programs (which offered precisely nothing to us battlers in the Platinum One tier). Far more importantly, we are now six full days into Qantas' seven-day double status credit promotion.

Status junkies across the nation – including an inordinate number of Commonwealth public servants and, I'm ashamed to say, yours truly – deluge Vanessa Hudson's coffers with ticket revenue over the two (separate) weeks each year when flight bookings earn double status credits. It is only a matter of time until the Sisters of Mercy establish a residential detox program for the wretched souls brought low by this man-made opioid.