Price competition at its best

The other day I talked about the promo email I received from Qantas with the special domestic deals they have on. Since then, I’ve seen banners all over the place – they’re really giving it a push.

This morning in my inbox, I’ve received an email from Air New Zealand – guess what it’s for? Domestic deals ending tonight. They’ve taken the exact promotion of Qantas and priced themselves lower. Check it out:

Then, in comparison here’s the email I got from Qantas the other day:

$10 difference between the two – like I said the other day, Qantas tried to make their deal out to be a lot better than it really was. Basically they just set themselves up to be easily beaten.

The brilliant thing though, is Qantas have responded with a price drop.

This is a screen shot just taken from the Qantas website:

Because of the perfect price information around, they were able to respond to Air New Zealand’s efforts and be competitive again and they were able to make changes quick enough to save a bit of face.

Qantas, good on you for trying with the email on Tuesday and even better for responding. But I hope you’ve learned you can’t get away with pricing hire the competition.

Just to give you a picture of the full market, here are Pacific Blues prices, the same as Air NZ and the updated prices from Qantas.

So the price wars have ended on a draw – it’ll be interesting to see who wins on brand.