Well-heeled Qantas passengers traveling to Bali will now be able to get horizontal before they reach the holiday island after the airline announced it was upgrading its Sydney service to an Airbus A330.
The decision to move up from a Boeing 737 from March 31 not only means the airline will offer lie-flat seats in business class but will see an additional 650 seats added to the route each week.
The A330 also means improved entertainment with seat-back screens throughout the plane for the six-hour journey.
Qantas International chief executive Alison Webster said the airline was seeing an increase in demand for premium travel to Bali.
“Our flights from Sydney and Melbourne are busy all year-round and Jetstar is seeing similar demand for its flights from across Australia,’’ she said.
“Our A330s are extremely popular with customers on other routes into Asia, and having this operate on the overnight flight back from Bali - particularly the fully flat bed in business - will make the flight even more comfortable.”
Qantas returned to the Sydney-Bali route in 2015 with a summer seasonal service and made that year-round in March 2017.
It also launched a daily Boeing 737-800 service from Melbourne in March 2018.
The additional seats will see the Qantas Group, which includes low-cost subsidiary Jetstar, offer almost 38,000 seats a week between Australia and Bali.
Despite disruptive volcanic activity and recent issues involving damaged passports, Bali remains a popular holiday spot with Australians.
Qantas pointed to figures showing more than 1.2 million Australians visited Indonesia in the 12-month period to October 2018 — up 200 percent on a decade ago.
About 10 percent of Australians planning an overseas trip in the next 12 months planned to travel to Bali, according to research firm Roy Morgan.
Qantas has been taking a renewed interest in holiday destinations closer to Australia and earlier this week announced it would operate mainline flights to Fiji for the first time in almost 20 years.
READ Qantas red tails return to Fiji
A four-day weekly service from Sydney is slated to begin March 31.
On the domestic front, however, the airline group announced Thursday it was cutting 35 Qantas and Jetstar return flights to Darwin between April and June 2019 because of lagging tourism demand.
The cuts include Qantas routes to Sydney and Brisbane and Jetstar flights to Melbourne. Adelaide and Cairns.
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