Qantas, Virgin hiking fares for AFL Grand Final shows duopoly’s grip

Qantas and Virgin Australia are charging between double and quadruple typical prices to fly to Melbourne for Saturday’s AFL Grand Final, invoking anger from fans and underscoring their grip on the market.

Soaring fares to reach the end-of-season showdown are an annual ritual in Australia, where Qantas and Virgin hold an effective duopoly. But the price of flights for this weekend’s match are especially eye-watering during a cost-of-living crisis. They also help explain why a raft of new airlines including VietJet Aviation JSC are considering entering the market to take a slice of the incumbents’ profits.

The Brisbane Lions and the Fremantle Dockers secured their places in the Grand Final at the weekend. By early Monday, Qantas’s cheapest Brisbane-Melbourne return fare to watch the game was $1658, while Virgin’s was $1728. Both are about triple the price on the same route two weeks later.

Qantas’ most expensive fare for the 2 1/2-hour flight was $2550. That’s more than quadruple post-game prices.

Fremantle will be seeking to win their first premiership since entering the AFL in 1995, while Brisbane are out to secure a third straight title.

Travel distances can be so vast in Australia that flying is often unavoidable. Brisbane to Melbourne is around 1780km by road, while the 3330km cross-country trek from Perth would take around three days.

There’s little that passengers — or the government — can do about the fare hikes, according to Rod Sims, the former head of Australia’s consumer watchdog who is now a professor at the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University.

“Yes, it’s price gouging, but that’s not against the law,” Mr Sims said in an interview.

Fremantle Dockers’ fans could fly to Europe and back with many airlines for the same price as a Grand Final trip. On Monday, the cheapest Perth-Melbourne return fare for the game on Qantas’s website was $2463, double the cost in two weeks’ time. The airline’s most expensive was $3667.

Virgin’s cheapest Perth-Melbourne return fare for the match was $2560, compared with $1772 two weeks later.

Exasperated fans lamented the surging prices on social media, with one television pundit calling them “disgusting.” While Qantas and Virgin both scheduled more flights for the Grand Final, they didn’t immediately reply to emails seeking comment on the fares, or any of the reaction.

Ron Issko, president of the AFL Fans Association based in Melbourne, described the airlines’ prices as “un-Australian.”

“To get tickets is hard enough, but to find out you’re going to pay double or triple to get there, it’s just unfair,” he said. “If you’re taking the public for granted, it will come back to bite you.”