Both Qantas and Virgin Australia saw their share of international passenger traffic into and out of Australia shrink in October as overseas carriers continued to grow their slices of the pie.
New government figures show international passenger traffic climbed 4% in October to 2.574 million as total capacity rose 2.4% to 3.338 million. Overall load factor increased, up 1.2 percentage points to 78%.
But the share of that traffic held by Australian designated airlines fell from 33.1% in October 2011 to 32.5%.
Both Virgin Australia and Qantas's share dipped 0.2 percentage points over that period.
However, the Qantas Group as a whole, with Jetstar and Jetstar Asia factored in, saw its share grow 0.2 percentage points to 26.2%.
Qantas remained the airline with the largest share of the market with 17.3% of the total, followed by Singapore Airlines with 9.2%, Virgin with 8.7%, Jetstar with 8.5% and Emirates with 8.3%.
But the figures showed the overseas carriers edging up with Singapore Airlines' share growing 0.3 percentage points on the same month last year and Emirates up 0.2 percentage points.
Low cost carriers made up 14.8% of the overall figure.
