Governments will ‘insist’ on Covid vaccines for international travellers, says airline boss

Qantas chief says governments are mooting vaccination as ‘condition of entry’

Qantas boss thinks vaccines should be mandatory for international travel (Qantas)

Governments are “going to insist” on international travellers being vaccinated, the boss of Qantas has claimed.

In an interview with BBC World News, Alan Joyce, the chief executive of the Australian flag carrier, said that governments worldwide are considering vaccination as “a condition of entry” for foreign arrivals.

He added that the airline would enforce its own policy to this effect even if governments didn’t.

“We have a duty of care to our passengers and to our crew, to say that everybody in that aircraft needs to be safe,” he said.

The majority of Qantas customers are supportive of vaccination being a requirement for international passengers, according to Mr Joyce, with 90 per cent of customers surveyed by the airline agreeing with the proposal.

Qantas lost A$1.03bn (£580m) in the last half of 2020, compared to a A$771m (£430m) profit during the same period in 2019.

Two thirds of the carrier’s aircraft have been put into storage, while around 8,500 staff jobs have been cut during the pandemic.

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The airline has launched creative new products to try to keep flying as much as possible while Australia’s borders have remained closed.

One of these was the idea of “mystery flights” – the new domestic services will depart from Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne, fly to an unknown destination no more than two hours away, and offer an experience on the ground before the return flight.

Experiences could include winemaking, a gourmet lunch or snorkelling by a tropical island, while the Boeing 737 flight itself will perform low-altitude flybys to enable sightseeing of famous landmarks.

Passengers won’t know where they’re going until they touch down – although they will receive a clue when they’re advised what to pack in their hand luggage.

Although Australia has been closed to most travellers for the last year, the country is in talks with New Zealand to introduce a “travel bubble” between the two nations.