Qantas doubles down on India with new flights

Qantas is doubling down on its move into India, launching direct flights between Melbourne and New Delhi for the first time in its history alongside a new service from Sydney set to start next month. The airline’s CE Alan Joyce said he expected strong demand for the service given Melbourne has a large Indian community, and based on the “unbelievable” number of bookings on its new Sydney-Delhi service since they went on sale last month. “In December there are only nine empty seats on our operation for that month, and we saw a lot of connecting traffic from Melbourne to Sydney, and that gave us confidence to fly direct from Melbourne to Delhi,” he said from Melbourne Airport on Monday. Qantas has not flown direct commercial flights to India for almost a decade, instead servicing the country via Singapore where passengers connected on its codeshare partner Jet Airways, which went bankrupt in 2019. But Joyce said that since the COVID-19 pandemic customers wanted to fly to their destination directly and avoid transferring through an overseas hub.<br/>