Jetstar: Auckland service will fly high

Simon Westaway says the Christchurch service has exceeded expectations. Photo / Richard Robinson

Jetstar launches transtasman services from Auckland today, confident it can prosper on the already crowded route.

The low-cost Qantas subsidiary will fly daily to the Gold Coast and Sydney in the latest expansion move in this country which will see it pick up Qantas' domestic operations from June.

The airline has been flying transtasman services out of Christchurch since late 2005.

Corporate relations head Simon Westaway said those services had exceeded expectations. "It's a tough market - the last six to nine months have been tougher, there's a lot of capacity now."

Qantas would revise its transtasman schedule and the wider group was now relying on frequency rather than capacity as being important to expand market share.

Most crucial for Jetstar was price, with 75 per cent of passengers driven by fares, which the airline says will be the lowest across the Tasman.

The airline is offering special $99 fares for Auckland to the Gold Coast and Auckland to Sydney. The flights will be available from 9am today until midnight on Sunday. They can be used for a month, starting on November 3.

Some bargain-hunters have complained of difficulty booking cut-price promotion fares through the airline's website in the past, but Westaway said it had been upgraded.

"At times when we have a lot of heavy fare promotions we are probably a victim of our own publicity but we do sell a lot of airfares. We have a very robust website, we're not Google but we can host up to 15,000 unique users at any one time."

Passengers must pay for extra services such as portable DVD players, food and drink.

Westaway said Jetstar's revenue targets remained on course, against a backdrop of parent Qantas sharply revising down its profit forecast this month and announcing plans to axe up to 1750 jobs.

"We're meeting expectations that our cost base (up to 40 per cent lower than full service carriers) is still reducing."

Jetstar chief executive Bruce Buchanan said the services had the potential to bring an extra 128,000 visitors into Auckland each year, generating as much as $315 million for the New Zealand economy, with Australian visitors spending on average $2462 each during their visit.

Jetstar now flies to 50 destinations in Australasia, Asia and the Pacific and had plans to connect the Auckland-Gold Coast flight to a Japan service in the future, potentially giving a much needed boost to the ailing Japanese market.

Jetstar has expanded its New Zealand workforce to more than 100 jobs and this number will increase when domestic operations begin and six aircraft are based in this country.