Must...Fly!

It wasn't that long ago that Emirates were selling tickets on Virgin Australia (then Virgin Blue) as a Visit Australia pass.

Now EY has jumped in to bed with Virgin. EK is seeking to gain a relationship with QF to enable codesharing and selling of QF seats to EK passengers. I don't think QF will gain a lot out of this, but it may be a longer term strategy to deal with the threat of the renewed, re-launched Virgin Australia. A price war is about to erupt between the two here, Qantas is going to flood the golden triangle (BNE, SYD, MEL) with seats. This could just be about getting every possible passenger on a QF aircraft, regardless of what it does to QF international - right now domestic is very profitable, international very unprofitable. Qantas desperately needs to protect it's domestic arm.

However it does provide an interesting cross-story to the constant rumbling of Qatar's possible entry in to oneworld. I doubt QF will align themselves too strongly with EK, oneworld provide not insignificant numbers to their domestic mainline operations. There is a story going around that BA/IB will partner with Etihad, thus creating a huge rift in oneworld, but I don't see it. EY, for me, is weak. Qatar in oneworld provides good options for Qantas going forward, especially as QR only has one daily flight from Australia at the moment (MEL-DOH) and a second soon to be launched (PER-DOH).