Virgin vs Qantas - who wins Australia's most punctual domestic airline?

Cast your mind back to all the times you've flown with our domestic Australian carriers. Do you think Qantas or Virgin Australia are most likely to be named the most on-time airline?

The stiff rivalry between the two continues, with Virgin winning the busiest month of the year, December, while Qantas earned the best score for the 2024 calendar year.

Qantas crunched the monthly dataset from the Australian Government's Bureau of Infrastructure and Transport Research Economics (BITRE) and found over 2024, its planes were on time 76.1 per cent, while its closest competitor, Virgin, was on time 73.7 per cent of the time.

Qantas claims this makes it the most on-time major domestic airline for five years in a row, and an improvement on its 2023 score of 74.1 per cent.

December 2024 was one of Qantas' busiest domestic seasons on record, and its cancellation rate was 2.7 per cent, down from 3.4 per cent in November.

But Qantas missed out on the top score for the all-important December month: that gong went to Virgin.

Qantas Domestic CEO Markus Svensson said the company was showing "really positive improvements" in performance over the past year - but admitted there was "still more work to do".

"We are investing a lot in areas like engineering and efficient boarding processes to further improve our reliability and are working with the broader aviation sector on how we can lift the performance of the industry as a whole," he said.

The Christmas and new year period is the busiest time of the year for our domestic carriers and Virgin was named the most reliable for the month of December, with 74.7 of its services departing on time.

Qantas followed with 73.7 per cent.

December was a record month for Virgin passengers, with more than 1.9 million guests flown across its domestic and international network. This is the highest number of passengers flown during any December in Virgin Australia's 24-year history.

Group CEO Jayne Hrdlicka said the stakes are "never higher" than during the important summer holiday period.

In December 2024, Jetstar was the biggest loser with an on-time departure score of 70.1 per cent.

The domestic airline with the highest on-time departure score was far-north Queensland's Hinterland with a score of 92.2 per cent, but this airline only flies a fraction of the planes the big carriers do, connecting people in Cairns, Cooktown and Torres Strait.

The airline that cancelled the most flights in December was Skytrans - which flies throughout Cape York and Torres Strait - with 2.9 per cent of its services not going ahead.