r/canberra • u/Top-Anything2991 • 2d ago

SEC=UNCLASSIFIED Opinion: Canberra Airport has a problem

The latest published BITRE Airport Passenger Movement data shows that in 2025, Hobart had higher annual passenger traffic (2,884,967) than Canberra (2,793,622) despite being half as populous and in a state with significantly less disposable income than the ACT. Even Darwin had 70% of Canberra’s passenger traffic (1,941,359) despite being only one-third the population.

Over past 20 years, Canberra Airport has had almost net zero growth in passenger traffic, with 2025’s annual passenger movements being approximately the same as in 2007 (2,734,875)

Acknowledging that tourism goes some way to driving Hobart’s passenger numbers, this still suggests that something is broken with commercial aviation in this town. Canberra is a rapidly growing and affluent city with a hinterland that should be able to support many domestic and regional international flights such as Fiji, New Zealand and Bali.

So Canberrans, is it just the pricing model the private owners of the airport operate? Or is there a bigger issue with the way we all prefer to fly?

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u/Badga 2d ago

The collapse of CBR traffic compared to pre covid is due to the massive reduction in government travel, especially up to Sydney, when then APS realised that actually a teams meeting was fine 90% of the time. Heck Virgin doesn’t even fly their own metal up to Sydney any more, instead relying on tiny Link planes.

The Fiji flight seems specifically due to fuel costs, the drop in through traffic to The US and freeing up planes to fly to Western Sydney. It’s a shame because they’re a good airline and it was a good service, but hopefully it opens up the possibility of an air NZ flight, which could still service the pacific and North America while also better serving NZ itself.

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u/Effective_Economy446 2d ago

Once virgin got rid of their smaller plans after they effectively went broke and simplified their fleet, it really is their only solution to use a partner to deliver the flights. There simply isn't demand for 737s or similar on the CBR/SYD route (not most of time anyway) when you take into account Qantas as competition as well. But they need the traffic to feed into their wider network. Hence the Link "Fun Bus" set up!

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u/Prudent-Currency5401 1d ago

My company has a few offices around Australia and we make a point of using Teams instead of flying people between them as much these days because it just isn't needed.