Qantas is celebrating a great result from its weekend fire sale, with the carrier selling out 10,000 $19 fares in only four hours on Friday morning, as well as doubling bookings on its full-service brand. These sales numbers are a positive sign for the local aviation industry, revealing that customers are eager to travel once the lockdown lifts completely.

Jetstar sells out $19 fares in four hours

Qantas' low-cost-carrier Jetstar sold out 10,000 $19 ($13 US) sale seats by 1 PM last Friday.

In a press release, Qantas highlighted how phenomenal this was. Looking at the numbers, for Qantas to sell out 10,000 tickets in only four hours, there would be roughly 42 tickets sold per minute. This is four times higher than regular traffic of around ten sales per minute.

By 2 PM on the same Friday, Jetstar had sold nearly 70,000 sales tickets of its 200,000 total. The $19 tickets may have sold out, but there were are still plenty of discounted tickets of around $35 each ($24 US) available.

The most popular bookings were from Melbourne to the Gold Coast, Melbourne to Cairns, and Sydney to the Gold Coast. Many of the destinations were travel routes, with flights to sunny Queensland taking the bulk of the sale. There were fewer tickets for business routes, like Sydney to Melbourne, available for purchase.

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Qantas full-service tickets double

It seems that this sale fever also extended to the full-service branch of Qantas. The airline offered triple points for any bookings made and sold double the tickets.

From Friday until the 24th of June, the carrier is offering triple points on any flight from the 27th of June to the 31st of October. This deal covers 92 routes in the Qantas domestic network, flying to 57 destinations. Currently, there are no Qantas international flights for sale. 

Some of the most popular tickets sold on this triple points deal were Brisbane to Cairns and Perth to Broome.

What does this mean for the Australian market?

These numbers are a good sign for domestic travel in Australia. The fact that the tickets have sold out almost instantly on Jetstar's website can tell us that the local market is willing to travel and not still worried about biosecurity.

But just because people want to travel, doesn't mean that Qantas is out of the woods.

Some of the tickets sold were to destinations still under lockdown. Flights to areas within Queensland from places like Melbourne in Victoria may face some issues. With a second wave on the cards in Victoria and the borders still closed between Queensland and the rest of Australia, it is unknown if some of these cheap holiday fares will take off. Queensland has said the 10th of July is when they will lift the restrictions, but that may change.

Virgin Australia investors would have also taken note of the sale, and we could fully expect themselves to throw out some deals when they eventually relaunch to put Qantas on its toes in a win for customers.

What do you think? Did you manage to secure some cheap fares in the sale? Let us know in the comments.