Adelaide Airport will finally have Qantas international service again from October 2025, with the flying kangaroo launching a direct seasonal service from Adelaide to Auckland.
From 31 October 2025 until 3 May 2026, Qantas will run a seasonal Adelaide-Auckland service four days per week. With flights running on Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays, they’re perfect for a long weekend trip.
Qantas will use a Boeing 737-800 with Economy and Business Class seats for its Adelaide-Auckland route.
Launch fares are on sale now from $699 return. There are also currently Classic Reward seats available in Economy on many dates, which you could book for 36,000 Qantas Points + $290 in taxes & carrier charges round-trip. However, we haven’t yet seen any Business Reward seats on this route.
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Qantas’ Adelaide-Auckland schedule
This will be the schedule:
- QF175 Adelaide (ADL) 08:30 – Auckland (AKL) 15:15
- QF176 Auckland (AKL) 16:15 – Adelaide (ADL) 18:35
The flight time from Adelaide to Auckland on QF175 is 4 hours and 15 minutes. The return QF176 will take 4 hours and 50 minutes, which is longer due to the headwinds when flying west across the Tasman.
QF175 from Adelaide to Auckland is timed to connect easily with Qantas flight QF3 from Auckland to New York. However, in the other direction, QF4 from New York to Auckland does not connect with QF176.
Competition for Air New Zealand
Air New Zealand already flies the Adelaide-Auckland route four days per week, with flights on an Airbus A320 in an all-Economy configuration. These flights are often quite full, although many passengers connect onwards from Auckland to other destinations in New Zealand, the Pacific and North America.
The last time Air New Zealand faced direct competition on this route was when Qatar Airways operated it as a fifth freedom service between March 2022 and August 2023. That was a pretty cool way to cross the Tasman because Qatar Airways used a Boeing 777-300ER with Qsuites in Business Class!
Qantas’ Boeing 737-800 seats are comfortable for a daytime flight, but aren’t quite in the same league…
More Qantas international flights from Adelaide to come?
Adelaide has been left without regular Qantas international service since 2013, when the airline dropped the Adelaide stop on QF81/82 between Sydney and Singapore. Qantas did briefly use Adelaide as a technical stop on its flights to Delhi in late 2021, but that only lasted a short time.
South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas said today this government “hopes that this marks the beginning of a long-term commitment by Qantas to grow their international services out of Adelaide.”
Singapore has been touted as a likely candidate for Qantas’ next international route from Adelaide. This would be an ideal route for an aircraft like the Airbus A321XLR which will soon enter service for Qantas – but not in the configuration Qantas is using.
Qantas is fitting its first batch of A321XLRs with similar recliner seats in Business to those found on QantasLink’s Airbus A220, as it intends to use these primarily on shorter domestic flights. Those seats would not be able to compete with Singapore Airlines’ lie-flat Business Class on the Adelaide-Singapore route.
My understanding is that Qantas is actively considering running Airbus A321XLRs on routes like Adelaide-Singapore and Canberra-Singapore at some point in the future. But if it did, it would most likely fit lie-flat Business Class seats onto the planes it would be using for those kinds of routes. This probably won’t happen for a few more years.
In the meantime, foreign airlines like United Airlines are adding international service to Adelaide Airport. United will fly seasonally from Adelaide to San Francisco from later this year.
This isn’t the first time Qantas flew from Adelaide to Auckland
Qantas last served the Adelaide-Auckland route from 2004 until 2007, before axing the route citing poor demand.
While the loads on this route may not have met Qantas’ expectations back then, many at the time blamed Qantas’ poor schedule and use of old aircraft. During that period, Qantas was running the Adelaide-Auckland route as a poorly-timed redeye flight on a Boeing 737-300. The return flight from Auckland to Adelaide left very early in the morning, at around 5am.
Some of Qantas’ Boeing 737-800s might now be starting to get a bit long in the tooth, but they at least do have personal in-flight entertainment and proper Business Class seats. The new schedule is also a lot more attractive.
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