Return airfares to Melbourne have hit $6,000 ahead of Saturday's AFL Grand Final, as Brisbane and Fremantle fans scramble for seats to the MCG. Prices surged the moment both clubs won their preliminary finals over the weekend — Lions supporters paying up in the hope of watching a historic three-peat, Dockers fans chasing their first grand final since 2013 — and the eye-watering fares have persisted even as airlines pour on extra flights.
Fremantle fan John Cooke, a lifelong Dockers supporter who booked early enough to dodge the worst of it, said he knows of supporters paying $1,900 for a one-way flight from Perth. "I've also seen people saying that you're better off getting flights to Europe or the US and spending a day shopping and sightseeing overseas and then coming back into Melbourne," he said. "It's not like there are five or six different airlines all competing for airfare seats. They're pretty much all knowing that they're going to be full. It's just profiteering."
On the Brisbane side, Lions fan Wendy Elson has a one-way ticket south and no way home yet. "I've been to 10 grand finals, so we're pretty good at working things out, but this year the flights have really hiked up. They're very expensive," she said, adding that prices jumped dramatically once the finals combination was announced. "I said to my son, we may end up having to hire a car and drive home … or hitch a ride with someone."
Griffith University aviation industry expert Justin Wastnage said airlines use increasingly sophisticated dynamic pricing to squeeze maximum revenue from a limited number of seats — "Airlines have a duty to their shareholders to maximise profits," he said — with major events factored straight into the systems. Some of it he describes as "dark arts": "If the booking platform knows your postcode and if it knows that postcode is within the territory of a home sporting club, it could even rank-jump those fares from searches from that sort of geographical area." He said some studies have suggested booking from a Mac computer could mean fares about 15 to 20 per cent higher, on the assumption the buyer is a higher-revenue passenger.
The airlines' answer has been capacity. Qantas added 13 Perth-Melbourne flights after Fremantle's preliminary-final win, with one-way fares advertised from $766 — travel-industry outlet Karryon reports those flights carry another 2,300 seats on top of 8,000 the Qantas group had already added — while Qantas and Jetstar put on seven extra Brisbane-Melbourne flights, around 1,160 seats for the weekend, with one-way fares starting from $234 on Jetstar and $375 on Qantas. Virgin Australia, the AFL's official airline, has added almost 4,000 extra seats from Perth and more than 1,000 from Brisbane, and says it will operate more than 110,000 seats on direct Melbourne flights in grand final week.
Demand is swallowing it anyway: Flight Centre says bookings to Melbourne from Brisbane and Perth are up 126 per cent on the same time last year. Relief of a structural kind is slower coming — the federal government has announced nearly $40 million to overhaul aviation consumer rights, including a new watchdog and complaints system that could lead to compensation for disrupted passengers.
None of which lands a Lions fan at the MCG by Saturday for less. For the thousands making the trip anyway, the calculation is simple enough: three-peats don't come along often — and if the flights home are gone, there's always the highway.