The consumer watchdog is investigating Qantas after customer complaints about late or cancelled flights, and is predicting more air travel chaos over the Christmas holidays.
Late flights and cancellations were at their worst levels outside of the pandemic period and domestic travel would not return to normal until well into next year as airlines struggle to beef up staffing levels, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) said in a report on Wednesday.
Flights run by all airlines have been disrupted over the past few months but Qantas, the national carrier which controls more than 60% of the market, has borne the brunt of complaints.
Gina Cass-Gottlieb, the chair of the ACCC, told Guardian Australia that Qantas “did not properly make a realistic assessment of how many flights they could serve” as air travel rebounded after the pandemic.
“We are investigating a number of complaints currently, so we have an ongoing engagement, if I put it that way, because our investigations are confidential til we’ve reached a point of conclusion on them,” she said.
She said the ACCC received the complaints about Qantas over the past few months but declined to say exactly what potential breaches of consumer law the regulator was investigating.
“We will look wherever we see there is evidence of misleading statements by any airline in relation to the way they have sold their services,” she said.
“If we have evidence of misleading statements, we will then pursue and investigate those aspects.”
A Qantas spokesperson said: “Qantas takes our obligations to comply with the Australian consumer law extremely seriously and we’ll respond to any requests for information we get from the ACCC.”
In a report released on Wednesday, the ACCC said on-time flights were at the lowest level ever recorded, with only 55% of flights arriving on time in July compared to the long-term average of 81.9%.
And 6.1% of flights were cancelled – more than three times the long-term average of 2.1%, but less than the peak in April 2020 when a third of flights were cancelled due to lockdowns and border closures.
“It’s not good enough,” Cass-Gottlieb said.
She said there were multiple factors behind the crisis that were not in the control of airlines, including airport security and air traffic control problems.
“What is much more in the control of the airlines though, is that they can be realistic about the number of flights that they can serve in a reliable way, based on their level of staffing, and take bookings for that number of flights and not for a higher number of flights,” she said.
The ACCC is also hopeful airlines will start to compete on service, noting regional airline Rex, which boasts of holding on to staff during the pandemic, had the lowest cancellation rate in July – at 2.1% compared with 6.2% at Qantas, 8.8% at Qantas’s budget arm Jetstar and 7.7% at Virgin.
Qantas slashed its workforce by about 7,800 people while much of its fleet was grounded during the pandemic, and shed an additional 2,000 contractors.
It has since hired an additional 1,500 staff but says tight labour markets are making recruitment difficult.
Qantas chief executive, Alan Joyce, was forced to apologise after blaming customers for not being “match fit” to fly as queues snaked around airports in April.
The company is also mired in industrial disputes with licensed aircraft engineers, who went on strike for a minute a fortnight ago, and flight attendants, where long-running negotiations for a new agreement covering domestic flights have stalled.
There is also trouble in baggage handling, which Qantas outsources to three other companies, with workers at one operator, Dnata, to go on strike on Monday and those at another, Menzies, preparing to ballot for industrial action, while the Transport Workers Union campaigns against the third, Swissport, over safety issues including firearms left on public baggage carousels.
Cass-Gottlieb said the ACCC did not have a role in industrial relations.
“Our focus is on the consequences of that [industrial action] and the capacity to be reliable and truthful in what is represented to consumers when they are offered a flight and expect the flight to leave reasonably on time and certainly not to be cancelled,” she said.
The ACCC predicts it will be “well into 2023” before staffing levels in aviation return to what is required.
