Australia’s three major airlines – Qantas, Jetstar and Virgin Australia – are well behind their international rivals when it comes to punctuality, with all three at the bottom of the pack in international ranking data released on Thursday.
Qantas was the best of the lot locally, with 73.85 per cent of its flights arriving within 15 minutes of their scheduled time, a widely used measure of performance among airlines, according to data compiled by aviation data provider Cirium.
Meanwhile, Qantas’ budget arm Jetstar and rival Virgin, recorded on-time performance rates of 73.39 per cent and 72.7 per cent respectively.
Qantas planes at Melbourne Airport.Credit: Getty Images
However, Qantas’ performance was a far cry from that logged by Mexican airline Aeromexico, which had almost 87 per cent of its flights landing within 15 minutes of their scheduled time.
Saudia, the flagship carrier of Saudi Arabia, ranked second worldwide, with an on-time performance rate of just over 86 per cent, according to Cirium. Japan Airlines topped the table in Asia Pacific, with an on-time performance of 80.9 per cent.
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Qatar Airways, which is waiting for Australian regulators to approve its plan to take a 25 per cent stake in Virgin, posted on-time performance of 82.83 per cent.
Cirium has rated airlines for timeliness for 16 years. CEO Jeremy Bowen said 2024 was a difficult year for airlines due to severe weather patterns and the summer technology outage. The winning airlines therefore deserved credit for getting most passengers to their destinations on time.
Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines scored the highest rating among US carriers despite a computer outage that caused thousands of flight cancellations in July. The airline achieved an on-time rate of more than 83 per cent to rank third worldwide.
