Cairns Airport, CEO, Richard Barker at the CAPA Airline Leader Summit Australia Pacific 2025

Transcript

Richard Barker:So Cairns Airport is probably the most regionally connected or internationally connected regional airport in Australia. So we fly to 9 international destinations. So every day we have wide-body aircraft that heads out to Tokyo, to Osaka. 4 days a week we have wide-bodies to Singapore, We have seasonal flights into Hong Kong. A couple of airlines fly to Bali. We go to Fiji via North America via Fiji and 2 destinations in New Zealand. So really well connected. We've got the opportunity to continue to grow that because we're really well positioned at the northern part of Australia. So as long-range narrow-body aircraft come into the airlines' fleets, if you want to reach Korea, Japan, northern parts of China, with a long-range narrow-body aircraft, you can do it from Cairns, but you can't do it from Brisbane or anywhere south. So we really think we've got an opportunity to grow. Realistically, we're a relatively small city, so these aircraft types are perfect for us for long skinny routes. Airline routes that wouldn't support a wide-body are perfect for a long-range narrow-body. So that's why we see we've got real opportunity to grow because 10% of all international visitors to Australia come to Cairns. Currently, they fly down to a capital city, then they fly up to Cairns, and then they fly back down again. You know, it's a much more time-efficient but also carbon-friendly way of visiting a World Heritage Area. Building on our existing markets, there's some of them we want to increase the frequency. There's some other cities— in the past, we used to fly to 4 destinations in Japan, and long-range narrowbodies are perfect for that. We want to strengthen our opportunities. We have seasonal flights this year into Korea. There's opportunities to test the waters there. We've been talking with airlines in Vietnam, and then the obvious one is India. But I think the logical way for us to get into India is to partner with our good friends at Singapore Airlines because they have a great network in India. Indian passengers love and trust Singapore Airlines, so simply using our connection to Singapore with seamless connectivity through to India is a logical way for us to step into that market. So for us, it's about diversification. We know it's an uncertain geopolitical world and things can be, you know, countries become, can be turned off and on. So for us, it's spreading the risk. And there's 3.5 billion middle-class Asians on our doorstep, and we know they love to come to our kind of place. So we think the future's bright. Cairns has a real opportunity to become the northern gateway into not only Queensland but to Australia. And the thing that really sets this opportunity up is the delivery of long-range narrow-body aircraft. So what that's going to facilitate is it's going to mean that if you have an A321XLR, you can reach from Cairns to Korea, Japan, into northern China with a long-range narrow-body that you can't reach if you're based further south. So if you're a capital city like Brisbane, you can't reach those markets with a long-range narrow-body, but Cairns is ideally placed. What that really is going to help us, and why we're excited about the growth prospects, is we have a fuel-efficient aircraft that is ideally suited for long skinny routes, and that's what we are. So in the past we've had widebodies flying to some destinations, but the aircraft was too big, we didn't have the capacity to fill it, whereas we can use and step into markets with a long-range narrowbody, and from there we can build frequency, and if in time we build enough demand, we can then move to a widebody, which is exactly what we did with Singapore Airlines, so it's a lower risk for our airline partners. It's good for our customers because we can be competitive on price, and it gives our airline partners more chance of being sustainable. So already we have elements of this in action. So we have Jetstar flying to Christchurch from Cairns. So from Christchurch in New Zealand, you can book a ticket from Christchurch to Tokyo via Cairns. You can book a ticket from Christchurch to Bali via Cairns, or you can book a ticket from Melbourne in Australia to Tokyo via Cairns. So this northern gateway where ideally we have aircraft based here, or similarly, if you're a North Asian carrier and you want to come to a market in the Great Barrier Reef, you can use a long-range narrowbody and you can make it to Cairns with the right size aircraft for the right route, and the economics work so much better for everybody. Yeah, so the, the board completed an upgrade of our domestic terminal just before COVID And then during COVID we actually kicked off a refurbishment of our international terminal to facilitate the growth in this northern hub that we're looking at, but also to provide amenities that are appropriate for the quality international brands that we use. So when you're dealing with airlines like Singapore Airlines and Cathay Pacific and Air Fiji and Jetstar, people will have expectations, and our infrastructure was Sound, but it was a bit tired. So we're doing an appropriate upgrade with new airbridges, expansion of our baggage reclaim, but being mindful that our overall costs need to be appropriate so that our airline charges are appropriate and we're competitive when we're competing for new services.

Copyright policy: All transcripts on this site are the copyright of CAPA - Centre for Aviation. Our reproduction policy is as follows: you may quote up to 400 words of any transcript on the condition that you attribute the transcript to CAPA - Centre for Aviation and link to the original video page. All other use is prohibited. While we aim for 100% accuracy in the transcript, there may be some minor transcribing errors.