A reminder: as of today, Virgin Australia’s new baggage rules — which focus more on the number of items you have than their weight — kick in. Hit our full guide to how they work and how to save money on baggage when flying with Virgin. (If you have a pre-existing booking, the rules that applied when you made it should still be in place.)

Virgin Australia will open its Gold Coast Airport lounge on Wednesday May 30.

Australian Business Traveller will be attending the media launch on Wednesday morning, and going on past experience with the airline'sMelbourne and Brisbane lounges we'd expect the lounge will open its doors to the public sometime that afternoon.

The Gold Coast lounge will seat around 135 travellers in 675 square metres of space, making it slightly smaller than its Brisbane sibling.

While the entry will be on the ground floor of the airport the lounge itself will be located upstairs, nestled between gates 1 through 3, affording a good view of the airfield. Read more

It's our airborne island of cell phone solitude.

But for how much longer?

Airplanes -- the final frontier for unplugging from all the noise going on 30,000 feet below -- seem to be creeping toward allowing cell phone use. And Virgin Atlantic is leading the way, announcing it has begun to allow phone calls, e-mails, texts and smartphone web browsing on some flights between New York and London. They plan to expand it to 20 flights by the end of the year. Read More

Virgin Australia will wheel one of its big guns onto one of Australia's shortest but most popular routes today.

That route is Sydney-Melbourne, which is in fact fourth busiest in the world, behind domestic services in Japan and South Korea.

And the big gun? It's the Airbus A330, which Virgin Australia now numbers four in its fleet following last month's arrival of two factory-fresh A330s from Airbus HQ in Toulouse, France.

The A330 carries almost 280 passengers compared to around 180 on the Boeing 737s commonly used by Virgin and Qantas (and which remains the domestic workhorse of both airlines).

Read more

Tired of cut-price economy fares while business class tickets remain pegged at a premium?

That's about to change, as Qantas and Virgin Australia cry 'game on!' in the continuing battle for Australia's business travellers.

The latest stoush sees a surge of extra seats hit the market as the airlines increase the number of daily flights and roll out larger aircraft for domestic routes. Read more: 

Passengers celebrating the prospect of lower fares on domestic flights are in for more treats in the coming months as Qantas and Virgin Australia step up their efforts to boost their inflight technology.

As Australia's two largest airlines head towards an all-out price war on domestic routes, they have been doing their best to ensure they will be able to offer more than just an inflight entertainment system, especially for business-class passengers. After a trial last month, Virgin intends to offer Samsung tablet devices - which will be preloaded with movies, TV and audio programs - to business passengers by the end of June. The wireless devices will be made available to economy passengers for a yet to be disclosed fee.

Read more:

Perth Airport's annual passenger growth could quadruple to 40 million in the next 17 years - more than double the estimate by the airfield's owners - according to a State Government paper.

The WA State Aviation Strategy Issues Paper, which has just been released for comment, warns that "even that figure, which represents a growth of 7.7 per cent a year, is conservative given over the past five years passenger numbers have soared by 9.2 per cent a year".

Plane movements are also breaking records, increasing by 260 per cent since 1992 to 141,000 a year.

Read more

Virgin Australia and Skywest have received government approval for a five-year 'corporate alliance' in a team-up to take on Qantas for Australia's corporate travellers, especially the mining and resources sector.

The ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) today gave the green light to the alliance, for which it issued a draft approval in March. read more

Air New Zealand is planning to increase capacity of flights to Perth.

The airline will boost capacity by 70 seats, replacing its 234 seat Boeing 767-300 with a 304 seat Boeing 777- 200ER for its direct flight from Auckland to Perth.

Air New Zealand group general manager Australasia Bruce Parton says Perth is becoming a more popular route.

“Western Australia is the fastest-growing economy in Australia and we’ve seen double-digit growth in visitor arrivals from Perth over the past year, with particularly strong growth over the past quarter.” Read more

The Australian government is extending its SmartGate program that allows Australians returning home to process their own passports in airport kiosks.

SmartGate, which uses kiosks with face-recognition technology to perform the customs and immigration checks usually conducted by airport customs staff, will receive $7.9 million over two years.

The kiosks are already in use at the Darwin, Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane, Cairns, Melbourne, Perth and Gold Coast airports, as well as at Auckland airport, for eligible travelers to Australia with ePassports.

The kiosks are also allowing the government to cut staff for the Customs and Border Protection Service, according to government budget papers that revealed that the kiosks will save the government $11.9 million over four years.