TL;DR
- Qantas has confirmed Sydney to London as the first Project Sunrise route, launching October 2027.
- It ends nearly 80 years of stopovers on the Kangaroo Route, which Qantas has flown since 1947.
- 22-hour flight time on a custom Airbus A350-1000ULR, with an extra 20,000-litre fuel tank built in.
- 12 aircraft on order, each with 238 seats across first, business, premium economy and economy.
- Tickets are expected on sale February 2027… more than 18 months for your clients to plan.
- Sydney-New York is confirmed as the next Sunrise route, with launch timing due next year.
What’s Happening at Qantas
Right, if you’ve got clients eyeing Australia in 2027 or 2028, this one’s been a long time coming. Qantas has confirmed Sydney to London as the first route under its Project Sunrise programme, with the non-stop service set to begin in October 2027, as TTG reports. It’s the first direct connection between Australia’s east coast and the UK, and it ends nearly 80 years of stopovers on the so-called Kangaroo Route. Qantas has flown the Sydney-London corridor since 1947, when the journey took four days and seven stops to complete.
The new service trims up to four hours off current journey times and removes the need to transit through Singapore or Perth. UK Tourism Minister Stephanie Peacock called it “a historic moment, not just for British aviation and tourism, but for the millions of passengers who will experience flying from Sydney to London non-stop for the first time.”
A Closer Look
The aircraft is the Airbus A350-1000ULR, developed specifically for ultra-long-haul work, fitted with an additional 20,000-litre fuel tank to make the 22-hour flight time possible. Qantas has ordered 12 of them, each configured with 238 seats across first, business, premium economy and economy.
The Sydney non-stop will run alongside Qantas’s existing Perth-London and Sydney-Singapore-London services, per TTG Media, so the older one-stop options are not going anywhere. Tickets are expected on sale in February 2027, giving your clients a long lead-in to think about timings, cabin choice, and whether they want to add stops or skip them entirely.
The Agent Angle
The bookings story here is wider than the flight itself. Tom Kendall, Audley Travel’s Senior Product Manager for Australia, told TTG that “the direct flight to Perth is incredibly popular with our clients,” and that he expects Sydney non-stop to follow the same pattern. His point worth holding onto, though, was the multi-destination one: a non-stop opens Sydney up to shorter stays and makes combined Australasia itineraries that take in New Zealand and French Polynesia much simpler for time-poor clients.
That’s a useful angle when a client is weighing up Australia for 2028. The Perth product hasn’t gone anywhere, the one-stop via Singapore is still there, and now Sydney joins the menu as a non-stop too. Three different shapes of the same holiday, and the right one depends on what the client values most: time, price, or the chance to break the journey.
Where This Shows Up in Real Life
Good news? You’ve got plenty of runway. With tickets not expected on sale until February 2027 and the service starting that October, this is a story to file under “worth knowing about” rather than “book this week”. It’s a handy bit of background for anyone already talking Australia for 2027 or 2028, and a fresh reason to revisit Australasia with clients who’d written off the long flight years ago.
