Virgin Australia Regional to Take Over Perth to Hobart Route

VARA will take over from parent airline Virgin Australia next month

From July 29th, operation of Hobart’s longest route will pass to Virgin Australia’s Perth based regional subsidiary, Virgin Australia Regional Airlines, formerly Skywest. The 4 hour and 50 minute flight will be flown by VARA’s seven strong fleet of Airbus A320-200s, most of which were formerly owned by VA’s low-cost subsidiary Tigerair.

Unfortunately, from a passenger’s point of view, the cabins have not been significantly changed from their Tigerair days, beyond the removal of a few rows of seats to allow fractionally more legroom. More significantly however, the aircraft do not feature any business class seating, and with only two rows of of Economy X extra legroom seats, it is going to be quite a long flight stuck in one of TT’s ultra-slim seats for anyone flying the route between July and October.

VARA’s fleet of Perth based Airbus A320-200s, cascaded from Tigerair, and Fokker F100s, from Skywest and Alliance Airlines, are primarily flown on routes from Perth to remote mines and regional centres in Western Australia. Beyond that, the A320’s are flown on the Perth to Adelaide route, and used to occasionally turn up as far east as Melbourne, but Perth to Hobart will be their longest route by far.

Currently the A320’s are showing up in the schedule consistently from the end of July, till mid-October, when Virgin Australia’s mainline fleet of Boeing 737-800s begin to return to the route, however, as always, this is likely to change with passenger demand and other factors. I will be checking out VARA’s A320’s from Adelaide to Perth in a month’s time so I strongly recommend checking out my Instagram, linked below, so you don’t miss out