Today was Qantas’s full-year financial results, yet CEO Vanessa Hudson opened the briefing by highlighting metrics that weren’t financial at all.
Namely, customer perception, an area that suffered significant brand damage under former CEO Alan Joyce, has improved sharply. Qantas’s domestic Net Promoter Score climbed seven points to 40, its highest in a decade, while the airline recorded almost 85 per cent on-time departures in June, outperforming every other major airline globally for the month.
A pivot away from financial performance can be a strategy for quickly moving on from a bad result. In Qantas’s case, the reality is more complicated.
Underlying profit before tax dropped $330 million to $2.06 billion year-on-year, but that fall sits inside a year in which the entire aviation industry was contending with war in the Middle East and a global fuel price spike. The gross hit from higher fuel prices was actually $1.01 billion; hedging cut that to a net fuel cost impact of $610 million, while a further $190 million in mitigations, including redeploying aircraft towards Europe, adjusting fares and domestic capacity, brought the final net impact on the Group down to $420 million.
Running an airline in 2026, it’s largely inevitable that geopolitics will land a blow somewhere in the year. How an airline responds to that blow is arguably as telling as the blow itself.
Hudson was also quick to credit the group’s “dual brand strategy”, which paid off clearly in this year’s results. Jetstar Domestic earnings rose 15 per cent, while Qantas Domestic revenue grew a comparatively modest 5 per cent. That divergence tracks neatly with the cost-of-living squeeze, and is one reason Hudson repeated Jetstar’s now-familiar claim that around half its fares sell for under $150.
The dual-brand structure allows Qantas to capture customers most sensitive to price through Jetstar, while the mainline brand chases premium travellers and invests in more premium cabin experiences. In a year when consumers are feeling the squeeze, that gives the group a way to serve both ends of the market rather than betting everything on one type of traveller.
That same instinct to insulate the group from market swings shows up most clearly in Qantas Loyalty, where underlying EBIT grew 12 per cent. Uber was the fastest-growing partner, Bunnings has just joined the program, and the Group is targeting $800 million to $1 billion in Loyalty EBIT by 2030.Loyalty has become the group’s shock absorber in a volatile travel market, a dynamic that isn’t unique to aviation, but one Qantas is leaning on harder each year.
The long-term signals matter as much as this year’s numbers, and none looms larger than Project Sunrise.
Qantas confirmed the first A350-1000ULR will arrive in April, with the inaugural non-stop Sydney-London service to follow in October, finally delivering on a promise that has been years in the making. For a country as geographically isolated as Australia, removing the need to transit through the Middle East or Asia is more than a marketing coup; it is a structural advantage no domestic competitor can easily replicate.
That advantage becomes more valuable, not less, in a year when Middle East disruption forced the rest of the network to improvise.
The A380 will begin retiring from 2028 as the Sunrise fleet and further A350s and 787s come online, with Qantas targeting a 10-12 per cent operating margin for its international arm by FY32, roughly triple the 3.7 per cent Qantas International posted this year.
Sustainable aviation fuel is a smaller and more honest story by comparison. SAF made up just 1.1 per cent of the Group’s total fuel this year, five times its share a year earlier, but still marginal in the context of a $5.7 billion fuel bill.
And perhaps that is the broader takeaway from Qantas’s result. The $330 million fall in underlying profit is significant, but it is not the only measure of where the airline is heading.
Qantas is Australia’s flagship airline, operating in one of the world’s most geographically isolated and challenging aviation markets, a fact made even clearer by the recent disruption in the Middle East. We are at the edge of the world.
But with a stronger customer proposition, a dual-brand model, a growing Loyalty business and, ultimately, Project Sunrise, Qantas is not simply absorbing those shocks. It is building around them.
This is an airline building for the long-term.
Qantas posts $2.06bn underlying profit as Middle East disruption bites
