Qantas maintains the regional rage against Virgin Australia, contracting Alliance Airlines

Qantas will enhance its domestic competition with Virgin Australia by making new pushes into regional Australia via a short-term partnership with Alliance Airlines, primarily a fly-in, fly-out operator serving the mining and resource sector. Alliance will operate an initial 19 services a week between Brisbane and Emerald with Fokker F100 aircraft, which with 100 seats are of higher capacity than the 74-seat Q400s Qantas normally uses - as well as the 68-seat ATR72 aircraft recently introduced by Virgin Australia, which broke Qantas' near monopoly on the route.

Qantas' regional network is primarily operated by subsidiary QantasLink, which CEO Alan Joyce has termed the "quiet achiever". But since Virgin Australia's push into the highly profitable regional Australia market in Oct-2011, Qantas has experienced a greater challenge to its dominance. It has already re-deployed 115-seat 717s from the west coast to the east coast and announced new frequent flyer lounges in regional centres. The high yielding regional market is the end-game for Virgin Australia to challenge Qantas more effectively. It does not score the major points in terms of market share, but it does deliver considerably higher average yields.