分类： business

Five years after pausing its packaged travel offering amid the global travel collapse triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, Australian carrier Virgin Australia has announced its return to the bundled holiday booking market, launching a revamped service to meet booming post-pandemic consumer demand for seamless travel planning.

Dubbed Virgin Australia Holidays, the new offering is built in partnership with global travel marketplace Hopper, and lets customers book both flights and accommodation in a single transaction, with a curated selection of domestic and international travel options to choose from. This relaunch revives a brand that first launched back in 2003, before being pulled from the market in 2020 when border closures and public health restrictions sent global travel demand plummeting.

The move comes as Australia’s travel sector experiences unprecedented post-pandemic growth, with Australians taking holidays at record rates and transforming expectations around how trips should be booked and organized. New joint research from Virgin Australia and research firm YouGov underscores this shifting consumer landscape: half of all surveyed Australians reported a clear preference for simpler, more time-efficient trip planning tools, while three-quarters of respondents said they would be more likely to book a travel package through their preferred airline if the offering included competitive pricing.

Libby Minogue, chief marketing officer at Virgin Australia, framed the relaunch as a strategic expansion of the airline’s core offering beyond standalone air travel. “Virgin Australia Holidays marks an important step in expanding our offering beyond flights and into a more complete travel experience,” Minogue said. “With more Australians seeking value and convenience, we’re bringing together flights, accommodation and Velocity benefits in one seamless booking experience, delivering greater value at a time when cost of living remains front of mind.”

To kick off the new service, Virgin Australia is offering limited-time introductory promotional packages for travel between July 15, 2026, and March 16, 2027, with deals available across popular destinations including Bali and Cairns. The promotional window closes at 11:59 pm AEST on May 27. Introductory pricing starts at $745 per person for a Bali package, which includes return economy flights from Gold Coast to Denpasar and four nights of accommodation for two travelers. For Cairns, packages start at $820 per person, including return flights from Brisbane and four nights of accommodation.

The service also includes additional perks for Virgin Australia’s Velocity Frequent Flyer members: customers with eligible package bookings can earn and redeem Velocity points, as well as accumulate Status Credits for their memberships.

Industry data confirms that the relaunch aligns with broader travel trends across Australia. Outbound travel hit 11.6 million trips in 2024, with continued growth recorded through the first months of 2025. While forecasters expect this rapid post-pandemic growth to gradually stabilize through the second half of the 2020s as demand normalizes, projections show outbound travel will hit 14.9 million annual trips by 2030. Ongoing strong demand for short-haul leisure destinations including Japan, China, Vietnam and Thailand is expected to shape future travel patterns across the country. Major Australian airports are already reporting record-breaking activity, with Sydney Airport noting its strongest ever first quarter for international travel in 2026.

Facing mounting pressure from U.S. President Donald Trump, European Union negotiators convened late-night closed-door talks on Tuesday in a high-stakes push to finalize a long-delayed transatlantic trade agreement, with a hard July 4 deadline hanging over the negotiations. If no deal is reached by the deadline, Trump has threatened to impose steep new tariffs that could reignite a full-blown transatlantic trade conflict.

The framework for this trade pact was first struck nearly a year ago in Turnberry, Scotland, between Trump and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. That initial agreement set a 15 percent tariff on most European goods exported to the U.S., but finalizing the binding legal text on the EU side has dragged on for months, drawing growing frustration from the White House.

Negotiations between representatives of the European Parliament and EU member state capitals got underway just after 9 p.m. GMT, with discussions expected to extend through the night. The core goal of the talks is to hash out a compromise that will allow the bloc to meet Trump’s deadline and close out more than 12 months of disruptive trade tensions between the world’s two largest economic partners.

Ahead of the negotiating session, the U.S. Mission to the EU issued a blunt reminder on social media platform X, writing that “A deal is a deal” and that the bloc must uphold the commitment struck between Trump and von der Leyen last year. If the EU fails to deliver, Trump has already warned that the bloc will face “much higher” tariffs, including a planned hike on duties for European passenger vehicles and heavy trucks from the current 15 percent to 25 percent.

The initial wave of tariffs Trump imposed before the Turnberry framework agreement — including steep levies on European steel, aluminum and auto parts — pushed the EU to aggressively expand trade partnerships with other regions across the globe. But Brussels has long recognized that it cannot risk alienating its largest single trade partner: the EU-U.S. trade relationship is worth a staggering 1.6 trillion euros ($1.9 trillion), making it irreplaceable for European economies.

Cyprus, which currently holds the rotating EU Council presidency, reaffirmed Tuesday that the bloc’s top priority remains the “swift implementation of the EU-U.S. joint statement” agreed last year. To get a deal across the finish line, the European Parliament is under heavy pressure from member states to roll back several controversial amendments it added to the text back in March, amendments that U.S. negotiators have already labeled unacceptable.

Bernd Lange, chair of the European Parliament’s trade committee, struck an optimistic tone ahead of the talks, telling reporters he remained hopeful negotiators could reach a workable compromise. But even before the session began, Lange was still working to unify divergent positions across the parliament’s competing political factions, with internal haggling continuing right up to the start of negotiations.

Delays in finalizing the accord have stemmed from multiple outside factors in recent months, including a diplomatic row sparked by Trump’s reported interest in purchasing Greenland, and a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that struck down broad portions of the president’s tariff authority. The European Parliament gave conditional preliminary approval to the text after those delays were resolved, but major sticking points remain between the institution, member states, and U.S. negotiators.

The European People’s Party (EPP), the parliament’s largest political grouping and the party von der Leyen belongs to, has emerged as the most forceful backer of rapid implementation of the deal. EPP leaders argue that resolving the trade uncertainty has become critical for European businesses that have faced unstable market conditions for more than a year. Zeljana Zovko, an EPP lawmaker, told the Agence France-Presse she was “confident that we will get it done” by the deadline. The EPP already secured firm backing for the deal from the hard-right European Conservatives and Reformists group, but several smaller factions have not yet publicly announced their positions, leaving the size of the pro-deal majority and its willingness to compromise unclear.

The Socialists and Democrats, the parliament’s second-largest political bloc, said it would approach negotiations “constructively” but would fight to add robust safeguards to protect European businesses and workers, guaranteeing long-term stability and predictability in trade relations. Two major sticking points remain on the EU side, even as negotiators work to find common ground. The first is a strengthened suspension clause added by parliament, which would revoke favorable tariff terms for U.S. exporters if Washington violates the terms of the agreement in the future. The second centers on “sunrise” and “sunset” provisions: the clauses would keep the EU’s side of the deal from taking effect until the U.S. meets all its existing commitments, and would automatically terminate the entire agreement in 2028 unless it is explicitly renewed by both sides.

Anna Cavazzini, a Green Party lawmaker involved in the negotiations, noted that “the odds are good” for a last-minute compromise, but warned that EU member states would need to compromise on the parliament’s core priorities to get a deal done. “These past weeks have shown time and again that Trump is not to be trusted, so the EU needs stronger tools at hand,” Cavazzini said, in defense of parliament’s proposed safeguards.

Australia’s most populous and economically active state, New South Wales (NSW), has issued a sharp downward revision to its upcoming financial year economic growth projections, citing cascading risks from the escalating conflict in the Middle East as a key destabilizing factor, NSW Treasurer Daniel Mookhey confirmed Wednesday during an address to the Sydney-based McKell Institute.

Previously projected to expand by 2.5% in the 2026-2027 financial year in forecasts published last December, the state’s economy is now expected to grow by just 1%, Mookhey revealed. The unexpected downgrade, released four weeks ahead of the official June state budget as an extraordinary pre-budget transparency measure, marks one of the clearest indicators of how Middle East tensions between the US, Israel and Iran are rippling through to the Australian economy.

Mookhey emphasized that the impact of the conflict on global energy markets will be persistent, even if hostilities de-escalate immediately. “Even if the war in the Middle East ended today, petrol prices are not falling tomorrow. Oil markets will take time to normalise – if they ever do,” he told the audience.

The slowdown is projected to hit NSW harder than any other Australian state, Mookhey explained, a gap driven largely by the state’s higher average mortgage sizes that leave households more exposed to elevated Reserve Bank of Australia interest rates. Higher inflation has forced central bank rate hikes to cool demand, which in turn has dragged down household consumption across the country. But in NSW, the burden is far heavier: the average working family taking out a new mortgage in the state borrows roughly $873,000, compared to just $677,000 for comparable households in Victoria, Australia’s second-largest state – a 28% difference. “That is why NSW fares better when interest rates fall. And fares worse when they rise,” Mookhey said.

Beyond economic headwinds, the treasurer waded into growing state political tensions around climate policy, as the incumbent Labor government prepares for upcoming state elections early next year, where right-wing populist party One Nation is gaining traction. One Nation, led by Pauline Hanson, recently claimed the federal NSW seat of Farrer earlier this month and turned in strong results in the South Australian state election, signaling growing electoral support for the party in the region.

Mookhey attacked the opposition for shifting alignment on net-zero policy, arguing that the federal Liberal Party has aligned with One Nation to oppose NSW’s legally binding net-zero emissions targets. The state Liberal-National coalition already faced a bitter internal split on the issue late last year, when then-opposition leader Mark Speakman reaffirmed the party’s commitment to net-zero, prompting a rupture with the rural NSW Nationals. Current opposition leader Kellie Sloane, who took over the role late last year, has faced mounting pressure from the increasingly right-leaning federal branch of the party to reverse the net-zero commitment.

“I have no idea if the NSW Liberal Party agrees with the Federal Liberal Party, which agrees with the One Nation Party,” Mookhey said. “The Member for Vaucluse (Ms Sloane) could end this uncertainty by declaring whether she is for or against the state’s legislated net zero targets. To campaign against NSW’s net-zero targets is to campaign for a NSW recession.”

Despite the sharp growth downgrade, Mookhey stressed that the state is well-positioned to avoid a full recession, pointing to the ongoing renewable energy investment boom driven by NSW’s early adoption of net-zero as an economic development strategy. The state is currently host to a large pipeline of renewable energy construction projects, paired with extensive upgrades to transmission infrastructure and grid connections that will drive sustained activity and investment through the slowdown. “NSW is home to this investment boom because NSW is (and was) the first state to truly have grasped that reaching net zero is a sound economic strategy,” he added.

Against a backdrop of escalating geopolitical tension and mounting economic instability, finance leaders from the Group of Seven major global economies wrapped up two days of talks in Paris on Tuesday, leaving French officials acknowledging that negotiations were marked by candid, at times strained, exchanges before the bloc agreed to a unified statement reaffirming commitment to multilateral collaboration.\n\nRoland Lescure, France’s finance minister, told reporters following the closed-door meetings that delegates engaged in open, unvarnished discussions to craft both immediate and long-term policy responses to pressing global economic challenges, with the core goal of safeguarding broad-based economic stability. The gathering included top finance officials from all G7 members, among them United States Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.\n\nDespite the friction in talks, the G7’s final official communique reaffirmed the bloc’s core pledge to work together through multilateral frameworks to counter growing risks threatening the interconnected global economy. The document framed current global conditions as a series of overlapping, complex challenges that demand coordinated policy action, pointing specifically to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East as a key driver of heightened economic uncertainty.\n\nIn the communique, G7 leaders noted that the Middle Eastern conflict has amplified existing risks to both global growth and persistent inflation, with cascading disruptions hitting critical global supply chains. The statement specifically called out acute pressures on energy, food, and fertilizer supply networks — disruptions that disproportionately harm low-income and vulnerable developing economies that rely heavily on global imports.\n\nOne of the most pressing geopolitical economic issues addressed was the persistent disruption to global shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, a critical strategic waterway that carries roughly a fifth of the world’s daily oil trade. Since the escalation of regional conflict, Iran has implemented an effective blockade that has severely restricted shipping traffic through the strait. The G7 statement called for an immediate end to the disruption, urging a “swift return to free and safe transit” for all commercial vessels.\n\nThis week’s meeting in the French capital was held as France holds the rotating G7 presidency, and it served as a key preparatory step for the group’s full head-of-state summit scheduled for June 2025. That higher-level gathering will be hosted at the Alpine lakeside resort of Evian, with French President Emmanuel Macron set to chair the proceedings, and U.S. President Donald Trump expected to attend in person.

Sixteen years after a bitter billion-dollar commercial conflict between Australia’s most powerful mining dynasties first erupted, legal representatives for the involved parties have headed back to a Western Australian court to resolve one last burning question: who will foot the staggering $100 million legal bill accumulated over more than a decade of litigation?

The dispute, which first kicked off in 2010, pits Gina Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting Pty Ltd (HPPL) against Wright Prospecting Pty Ltd (WPPL), another firm controlled by prominent mining heirs. The core of the conflict centered on contested rights to lucrative iron ore royalties and critical mining assets tied to the Hope Downs operation in Western Australia’s resource-rich Pilbara region. After years of pre-trial wrangling, the high-stakes case finally reached the WA Supreme Court for a full 53-day trial in 2023, with daily legal fees estimated at a jaw-dropping $250,000 – a rate that pushed total projected costs across the entire 16-year dispute to roughly $100 million, according to local media reports.

Last month, Justice Jennifer Smith delivered her long-awaited landmark ruling more than two years after the close of trial proceedings. The decision handed a major partial victory to WPPL, ordering HPPL to share hundreds of millions of dollars in iron ore royalties with the rival firm. DFD Rhodes, a third entity linked to the Rhodes mining family, also secured partial success in its claim for a share of royalties. However, Rinehart retained full control over the billion-dollar mining licences for the East Angelas site, after the court dismissed competing claims over that site from WPPL and from Rinehart’s own children, John Hancock and Bianca Rinehart.

With the core ownership and royalty questions settled, the court has now turned to the unresolved issue of cost allocation. Arguments put forward by all sides reveal deep divisions over who should bear responsibility for the massive legal expenses.

WPPL’s legal team is pushing for HPPL to cover 75% of its total costs, arguing that WPPL won the majority of its core claims. But HPPL’s senior counsel Charles Colquhoun SC pushed back, noting that his client retained ownership of the highest-value asset in the entire dispute – the East Angelas tenements. “It can’t be denied that we won on the propriety claim and there needs to be some victory on that issue,” Colquhoun told the court. “It was the most important issue in the proceedings, certainly the most valuable issue in the proceedings.”

The biggest point of contention now surrounds the failed claims brought by John Hancock and Bianca Rinehart, who were seeking a portion of their grandfather Lang Hancock’s mining legacy. DFD Rhodes has argued the pair should be held responsible for 15% of total costs, while WPPL is pushing for an even higher 20% allocation, arguing that the siblings’ involvement unnecessarily lengthened the proceedings and drained significant court and legal resources.

Julie Taylor SC, representing WPPL, told the court that the siblings’ defense alone spanned 250 pages, and their closing submissions ran to 749 pages. “John and Bianca took 14 days of the hearing time for their submissions alone, all the parties had to respond to that,” she said. “A rough estimate of 20 per cent would be fair.” For their part, the siblings have argued that each party should simply absorb its own legal costs after their unsuccessful claim.

The WA Supreme Court is now reviewing all submissions from the multiple involved parties before issuing a final ruling on cost allocation, closing the book on one of Australia’s longest-running and most expensive commercial mining disputes.