Tiger forced to delay Alice Springs launch

[Standby]

Tiger forced to delay Alice Springs launch
Steve Jones



Tiger Airways has slammed Qantas after being forced to delay the launch of services to Alice Springs by three months.

The low cost carrier was due to begin services on December 1 but will not start operations now until March 1.

Tiger directly blamed Qantas after the flag carrier said it would be unable to provide ground handling services for Tiger at Alice Springs airport.

Tiger chief executive Tony Davis said; “The behaviour of Qantas shows their contempt for the people of Alice Springs and certainly shows why Qantas is so desperate to maintain its dominance of the Australian domestic market.

“It is common practice in the aviation business for airlines to undertake ground handling for third party customers at commercial rates. Indeed, Qantas already handles a number of other airlines across Australia and was more than willing to accept Tiger’s money when we launched services to Darwin.”

Tiger said it spent months negotiating with Qantas, who it described as having a monopoly of ground handling at Alice Springs, and even offered to reschedule the timing of its flights.

The carrier will now organize for another ground handling company to establish itself at the airport.

“Unfortunately this takes time,” Tiger said in a statement.

Passengers with bookings will be refunded or can re-book on a flight after March 1. All affected passengers will also receive a $50 voucher towards a future flight.

23 November 2007

Let me think where in AUST does DJ and Qantas or JQ or vv...answer nowhere...what a naive expectation .Blame someone else for your own shortcomings.
And the offer of a refund and an extra $50 voucher to use on Tiger is slightly less than sorry we'll transfer you to another carrier as and answers a question in the thread earlier relating to poss delay start up.

 

[Shano]

Mods, maybe it is time to start a Tiger Forum to accommodate the growing number of Tiger threads ?

Oops, just realised that those are loyalty program forums not general airline forums

 

[NM]

Mods, maybe it is time to start a Tiger Forum to accommodate the growing number of Tiger threads ?

Only Admin can create new fora.

But since this is a media article, I am moving it to the Travel Articles forum.

please note that for copyright purposes, it is best to only quote a brief part of the media article and to include the URL link to the original source.

 

[SeaWolf]

Well, I'm not really surprised that QF is being unhelpful here, but I would have thought that if they were the monopoly ground handling company up there that they'd have some kind of obligation to provide those services, even if its fondest wish would be to see Tiger crash and burn.

 

[sf#7]

I wld like to see a poll from ppl to see if they think Tiger will last here in OZ?

 

[Tannin]

Hmmm, I'm hoping to see more info on this. I've only seen it so far on The Age - not on Tiger or any other news source.

If I read it correctly Tiger had a pre-arrangement with Qantas to provide ground services. Qantas appears to have cancelled it at the last minute. This would explain their anger. And rightfully so.

I was supposed to fly Dec 1 - a mere 8 days away. I think Tiger is going to need to be more 'generous' to people flying in the first flights to cover any cancellation charges they may not be able to avoid. The 'travel insurance' excuse will not hold up well here.

With approx. 200 passengers per flight, and 3 months worth of flights, there's going to be a lot of unhappy campers.

Will Tiger last in Oz? I think so, absolutely. They have a large backer, and their IT services are 6000% better than Jetstar. No crashes, no pathetic sales with a lousy number of seats, no servers that go down during high load, and so on. Good luck to them I say.

 

[docjames]

Well, you want to service anywhere that has a monopoly, you've got to be prepared to pay full whack. If you're not, either
1. Pay it
2. Set up your own (which takes time)
3. Pay it until #2 is complete.

You need skill and training to be ground crew, and i'd suspect the cost of keeping someone with appropriate skills in a town like Alice Springs would be fairly high.

Did they expect to get the service for chicken feed? They're subsidised at every other airport that's gagging for them to fly there. Maybe they've underestimated the costs of flying to/from Alice Springs.

Also, if they've released such a statement, dont expect Qantas Group to take it lying down either.

 

[oz_mark]

Well, you want to service anywhere that has a monopoly, you've got to be prepared to pay full whack. If you're not, either
1. Pay it
2. Set up your own (which takes time)
3. Pay it until #2 is complete.

You need skill and training to be ground crew, and i'd suspect the cost of keeping someone with appropriate skills in a town like Alice Springs would be fairly high.

Did they expect to get the service for chicken feed? They're subsidised at every other airport that's gagging for them to fly there. Maybe they've underestimated the costs of flying to/from Alice Springs.

Also, if they've released such a statement, dont expect Qantas Group to take it lying down either.

In my reading the problem is they can't get Qantas to provide the service at any price, although it sounds as though Tiger was under the impression that the service would be available to them. They would hardly announce a service without some belief that they would be able to provide the service.

I guess the difference between Alice Springs and other airports is the other airports seem to have multiple providers of ground handling services.

 

[Mal]

Problems with flying to Alice were actually dicussed here a couple of days ago. Amazing how AFF keeps ahead of news channels at times

There is probably more to this story than what is published.

 

[milocole]

if i was Mr Davis, i would try to have nothing to do with Qantas, GO TIGER!!! (only18 hours or so to my TT flight!!!)

 

[Mal]

Qantas has Tiger by the tail | The Courier-Mail
"Qantas executive general manager John Borghetti said he was not in business to help his rivals.

"It is normal practice for any business to have all of its arrangements in place before it starts operating," Mr Borghetti said.

"Assisting competitors is not part of my job description." "

 

[pauly7]

Bit of a funny story, was reading this thread thinking 'Oh well thats the risk you take with an LCC I guess' and thinking that it was pretty rough of Tiger just to abandon their passengers without even rebooking them (I mean even DJ did that at the start)...

Then, my sister calls, who is backpacking around from Aus next week with a friend, and was booked onto a Tiger/Alice flight. I resisted the 'didn't you see all the *pending approval etc notices' but to 'normal flyers' they are very small type notices on the website combined with 1000 other notices and easy to miss. Understandbly she is furious about it and not happy about also having to wait 2 weeks before Tiger will refund.

Apparently the Tiger call centre have been quite rude saying they can't get it refunded any more quickly (which is rubbish, if you really want to you can do CC refunds on the spot, the only thing that is stopping them is their own red tape) which is pretty annoying for people.

I think its pretty cough they aren't rebooking them either, I do understand why - because they can't afford to, (Tigers call centre excuse 'We aren't a travel agent we can't book other airlines') but I still don't think it is right.

What I do know is that they would have lost alot of potential customers who have been burnt by this.

 

[milocole]

Bit of a funny story, was reading this thread thinking 'Oh well thats the risk you take with an LCC I guess' and thinking that it was pretty rough of Tiger just to abandon their passengers without even rebooking them (I mean even DJ did that at the start)...

Then, my sister calls, who is backpacking around from Aus next week with a friend, and was booked onto a Tiger/Alice flight. I resisted the 'didn't you see all the *pending approval etc notices' but to 'normal flyers' they are very small type notices on the website combined with 1000 other notices and easy to miss. Understandbly she is furious about it and not happy about also having to wait 2 weeks before Tiger will refund.

Apparently the Tiger call centre have been quite rude saying they can't get it refunded any more quickly (which is rubbish, if you really want to you can do CC refunds on the spot, the only thing that is stopping them is their own red tape) which is pretty annoying for people.

I think its pretty cough they aren't rebooking them either, I do understand why - because they can't afford to, (Tigers call centre excuse 'We aren't a travel agent we can't book other airlines') but I still don't think it is right.

What I do know is that they would have lost alot of potential customers who have been burnt by this.

:shock: I was quite shocked by Tiger doing this, seriously they have lost THOUSANDS of customers, anyway if they didn't get approval, this is what they would have done, just refunded people, and the airline would probaly have gonw under as well. Anway im leaving in about 20 mins for my TT flight to the GC, ill be taking heaps of phots, videos etc, and pics of the T4, and T3 at the Gold coast. I hope on VH-VNC (new), anyway i will post my LONG report on this forum or airline quality review website on either Sun, Mon, or tuesday. I will most likely write this from one of those web cafes at Broadbeach at Pacif Fair, Im sooooo nervous, BYE

 

[SeaWolf]

Isn't there regulations about monopoly providers refusing service to potential competitors? After all, Telstra has long been forced to provide access to its network.

The people who really lose out in all this are the people of Alice Springs, who are going to have to keep paying monopoly rates to QF until TT can get itself setup. It's certianly not going to help raise QF's image in their eyes. If QF wants to keep hanging onto that 65% share of the domestic market its going to have to start to accept that it isn't the only bird in the sky anymore and that it needs to being appealing to consumers, rather than acting like they have nowhere else to go.

 

[oz_mark]

Bit of a funny story, was reading this thread thinking 'Oh well thats the risk you take with an LCC I guess' and thinking that it was pretty rough of Tiger just to abandon their passengers without even rebooking them (I mean even DJ did that at the start)...

In most cases, Tiger are 'abandoning' people in their home town (Melbourne). Also, you would need to consider what reaccommodation options would even be available if they were going to do this. It is one thing to reaccomodate on a MEL-SYD sector, but MEL-ASP could be quite a different story.

 

[NM]

Isn't there regulations about monopoly providers refusing service to potential competitors? After all, Telstra has long been forced to provide access to its network.

That probably depends on your definition of a "monopoly". Is Qantas the only groiund handling provider at that location only because nobody else has bothered to establish the facilities? Or is there some regulation or other impediment protecting Qantas as the sole service provider?

And has anybody confirmed that Qantas refused to provide the service, or was it just that the two parties could not agree on mutually acceptable terms? I can imagine QF would be reluctant to offer terms that would be desirable to TT.

 

[oz_mark]

Isn't there regulations about monopoly providers refusing service to potential competitors? After all, Telstra has long been forced to provide access to its network.

The people who really lose out in all this are the people of Alice Springs, who are going to have to keep paying monopoly rates to QF until TT can get itself setup. It's certianly not going to help raise QF's image in their eyes. If QF wants to keep hanging onto that 65% share of the domestic market its going to have to start to accept that it isn't the only bird in the sky anymore and that it needs to being appealing to consumers, rather than acting like they have nowhere else to go.

Certainly, it seems that someone in Qantas has taken a rather childish attitude, and maybe there are legal avenues for Tiger to investigate.

Reading between the lines of this whole thing, I suspect that Tiger and Qantas had negotiated on access, but it got stopped somewhere up in the approval process within Qantas.

 

[Petch]

someone in Qantas has taken a rather childish attitude, and maybe there are legal avenues for Tiger to investigate.

It would seem, there might be other avenues as well -

"It is ironic that a subsidiary of Singapore Airlines, a Tiger Airways shareholder, provides ground handling to both Qantas and Jetstar in Singapore" Tony Davis

e-Travel Blackboard: Australia's Number One Industry Newsletter

 

[oz_mark]

It would seem, there might be other avenues as well -

"It is ironic that a subsidiary of Singapore Airlines, a Tiger Airways shareholder, provides ground handling to both Qantas and Jetstar in Singapore" Tony Davis

e-Travel Blackboard: Australia's Number One Industry Newsletter

Doubt there is much they could do - there are other ground handling providers in Singapore that would be ready, willing and able to do the job if SATS stopped.

 

[Standby]

It would seem, there might be other avenues as well -

"It is ironic that a subsidiary of Singapore Airlines, a Tiger Airways shareholder, provides ground handling to both Qantas and Jetstar in Singapore" Tony Davis

e-Travel Blackboard: Australia's Number One Industry Newsletter

As always the devil is in the detail and never let fact get in the way of a good whinge.
The subsidary is called SATs ...a ground handling company NOT an airline. also lets not use the Kevin Bacon 7 degrees of separation here...Sats is also a subsidary of the Sin govt Its role is to provide cost effective ground handling for an airport with a bit more Through-put than ASP...inorder the expand their economy..there is nothing stopping the NT GOVT doing likewise...or heaven forbit Tiger do their own.