Qantas (QF, Sydney Kingsford Smith) is not going to fight to keep Qatar Airways (QR, Doha Hamad International) in Oneworld, CEO Alan Joyce told the South China Morning Post.
"If they decide to leave, it is because it is no longer working for them. Nobody should be in an alliance where they believe its not working for them. If Qatar feel they do better outside of Oneworld, that is up to them," Joyce said.
The boss of the Australian flag carrier was responding to repeated threats from Akbar Al Baker, his counterpart at Qatar Airways, that the Gulf carrier could leave the alliance. While the dispute has generally concerned the campaign of American Airlines (AA, Dallas/Fort Worth), another Oneworld member, against the alleged state subsidies to Qatar, earlier this week Al Baker explicitly named Qantas as an example of an obstructionist airline.
The Qatari executive cited an internal memo at Qantas criticising Qatar's expansion into Australia as an example of the two Oneworld members being at odds.
Joyce said that while he did not oppose Qatar's expansion as such, he would like to see it done on fair market terms.
"Our view has been very simple, we’re after fair competition. If aviation was governed by the World Trade Organisation, there would be some dumping cases against people for going in well below cost to force people off routes and markets. We think those rules should apply to aviation markets," Joyce said.
He added that Qantas would be able to replace most of the destinations currently served via an alliance partnership with Qatar with routes operated in cooperation with Emirates (EK, Dubai International) or Air France-KLM.
"We’ve plenty of other alternative mechanisms, which is the way our network is designed. People have a lot of choice on the Qantas-coded network to get to the same European points that they had been using Qatar," Joyce said.
