Australia’s busiest international air route city pairs revealed with Melbourne-Singapore surprising analysts

Australia’s busiest international air route city pairs have been revealed with Melbourne-Singapore surprising analysts to sit at number one, with more than 1.776 million passengers flying that route each year.

Singapore features in all top three positions, with Sydney-Singapore (1.705m) and Perth-Singapore (1.455m) coming second and third respectively.

Perhaps another surprise was Perth-Denpasar (1.110m) sitting so high in fifth, boosted in part by a larger number of low-cost international airlines flying to Perth compared to other major cities.

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Brisbane — hit hardest by Virgin’s departure from long haul international flying in 2020 — doesn’t feature until 8th spot, where Brisbane-Singapore (946,306) sits ahead of Brisbane-Auckland (928,353) and Sydney-Hong Kong (922,351).

The data was compiled by AnalyticFlying.com from the federal government’s Bureau of Infrastructure and Transport Research Economics (BITRE) figures.

Evan from Analytic Flying says the figures can jump around from year to year.

“In the last year, on some Qantas Singapore flights operated with Finnair aircraft, quite a few of those flights got cancelled when Finnair had some strikes,” he told 7NEWS.

Qantas leases Finnair Airbus A330s and flies them between Sydney and Singapore/Bangkok.

“Some of them got made up [for] by Qantas with larger aircraft, but some didn’t. So it’s difficult to sort of disentangle the short-term variations in capacity from patterns or events,” he said.

Busiest international flight routes from Australian cities. Credit: Analyticflying.com/ 7NEWS

Another quirk of the data is that passengers flying Sydney-Singapore-London on Qantas are not added to the Sydney-Singapore route’s passenger numbers.

Instead they are recorded simply as Sydney-London passengers because the flight number (QF1 outbound or QF2 inbound) doesn’t change across the two legs.

Qantas passengers flying Melbourne-Singapore-London are counted on Melbourne-Singapore because the flight number (eg. QF37) is different to the Singapore-London leg (QF 1 / QF 2).

“I suppose the biggest surprise,” says Analytic Flying’s Evan, “There was a lot more capacity to New Zealand before the pandemic, and at the same time, higher traveller numbers between Australia and New Zealand.”

Auckland features in three of the top 10 busiest routes involving Australian cities.

This also points to Virgin’s decision to pull out of much of its trans-tasman flying after covid — VA only offers services to Queenstown, relying on a codeshare agreement with Air New Zealand to service other cities.

“We’ve seen significant loss of capacity between Australia and New Zealand that leads to higher fares over time,” Evan explained.

Brisbane has around 150,000 fewer seats than before the pandemic.

“That’s actually quite worrying,” says Analytic Flying, “because Brisbane has poached a lot of international flights from Gold Coast during that time.”