After nearly two years, Qantas’ first flights from eight international destinations touched down in Australia today. This week, the Qantas Group will fly over 14,000 passengers into Australia as quarantine and border barriers for international travelers come down.
On Monday (February 21, 2022), Qantas announced the restart of regularly scheduled inbound international flights to Australia for the first time in nearly two years, as quarantine and border barriers finally come down. Qantas flights from eight overseas destinations touched down today in Australia, providing a highly anticipated boost for the country’s tourism industry. Flight QF12 from Los Angeles landed first today at 06:20, while other flights from Vancouver, Singapore and London landed later in the day. Jetstar’s first unrestricted international flight, JQ18, from Phuket touched down in Melbourne at 10:05, while flight QF70 from Mumbai touched down in Melbourne at 13:35.
In Today’s announcement, Qantas Group’s CEO, Alan Joyce, said,
“It’s fair to say we’ve all been waiting a long time to welcome visitors back to Australia. The thousands of international tourists arriving this week and many more over the coming months will help kickstart the tourism industry which has done it tough for the past couple of years. We’re in this position today thanks to the millions of Australians who rolled up their sleeves to get the jab and give the Australian Government and state and territory governments’ confidence that we can safely reopen to the world. We can clearly see from the Australian Government’s announcement that people are very keen to come back to Australia, and we continue to see strong bookings out of the US and UK, as well as South Africa and Canada.”
Qantas previously restarted international flights for Australian citizens and visa holders on November 1st, 2021, with several routes coming online since that time. The carrier resumed service between Sydney and Dallas on February 16th and the Group will be relaunching flights to other international destinations in the coming weeks.
Source: Qantas