Originally Posted by
notzac
While I normally respect CAPA articles, I do think this one is a bit far-fetched. CX have said a number of times that they are sticking with oneworld (which presumably means sticking with their partners in the alliance..?), CX and SQ are very strong competitors and, to the best of my knowledge, CX have never codeshared on any QF flights AU-HKG in order to direct more traffic in to their network .. so why would they start doing so with another non-alliance carrier?
Presumably VA will want to start flying in to Asia on their own metal at some point .. it would absolutely make sense to fly to HKG under their own steam (maybe something like MEL-HKG with VS codesharing on it), but if they're after a Northern Asian partnership - wouldn't NH or KE make more sense? Underserved markets, quality carriers that aren't aligned with QF already, etc..
The biggest problem with any japanese or korean carrier, at least from Virgin Australia's perspective, is how far north they are. Travel times to Taiwan and southern China would be significantly longer then they needed to be because of the amount of backtracking that would be involved. Geographically, Manila would be ideal for sending flights into North Asia, but MNL is a mess and Philippine Airlines isn't the greatest. Taipei isn't bad but neither China Airlines nor Eva Air are particularly big. In this sense Cathay is a logical partner because no one else is and they have a reasonably located hub along with significant scale. The only other large carrier in the area is China Southern, but most of their scale is concentrated in china (not that that's a bad thing if you're looking to get to china, but for anywhere else connections would be limited).