Anthony McDonald

It's raising ticket prices, conserving capital, cutting capacity.

But you can't do any of those things quick enough or in the quantity large enough to be able to protect earnings.

So, I mean, the week ends with analysts saying Qantas is going to make about 10% less this financial year than they expected only a couple of months ago.

Okay.

But the airlines are cheeky, James.

They very carefully play with volume and price to try and manufacture the best outcome for themselves.

So Qantas is going pretty hard on volume.

So it's cutting capacity, particularly on the Jetstar side of the brand.

Maybe to take those cheap tickets out of the market,

Just to make sure the planes are more full of high-paying customers.

Every trip is sort of making more for them.

So just think about what that means for consumer sentiment, willingness to travel, all that sort of stuff.

It will have an impact.

Virgin Australia, interestingly, went one day later.

I mean...

Virgin's obviously a good competitor to Qantas domestically, but it's just so much smaller than Qantas.

It spends like a fifth as much on fuel.

It's done more hedging, which is partly good luck and partly good management.

So it's not as impacted in terms of the near-term profit.

Okay.