Speaking at the airline's annual meeting on Friday, Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce said the airline would "stay disciplined on cost, manage our capacity to match demand", and carefully hedge fuel.

"Like most other global carriers, intense competition on international routes means we're seeing air fares below where they were 12 months ago," he told shareholders at the meeting in Sydney.

"And the economic transition in Australia and broader geopolitical issues in the northern hemisphere continue to have an impact on aviation markets globally."

In what has been termed a "golden era of travel", Flight Centre recently said that airlines had been chasing market share on international routes, leading to record low fares to London and other top destinations.

While declining to reveal the financial performance of individual routes, Mr Joyce said flights to London from Australia's east coast had been a challenge because Qantas was competing against more than 30 airlines on the so-called kangaroo route.

"That is one of the reasons we are considering Perth-London," he said.

Qantas will take deliver of the first of eight Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner aircraft in just over a year, which will allow it to fly a range of new routes such as Perth-London.

Mr Joyce said routes such as Melbourne-Dallas, Sydney-Chicago and Perth-London and other destinations Qantas "had to walk away from in the past ... have suddenly appeared on the radar screen".

Last week Qantas announced it will resume flights between Sydney and Beijing in January using A330 aircraft, more than seven years after it axed services to China's capital.

The return to that route comes ahead of Virgin Australia's plans to launch services to Beijing and Shanghai next June. The country's two largest airlines are eager to tap into opportunities in China, which is Australia's fastest-growing inbound travel market.

Macquarie analysts also said on Friday that Qantas stood to benefit from strong growth in visitors from Japan and the US. About 40 per cent of Qantas and Jetstar's combined international capacity is devoted to routes to those two countries.

In a departure from its previous reporting, Qantas will replace monthly traffic statistics with quarterly trading updates, the first of which will be released at the end of this month.

The market expects Australia's largest airline to report an underlying pre-tax profit of $1.54 billion this financial year, compared with $1.53 billion in 2015-16.

In August, Qantas reported an 84 per cent surge in net profit to $1.03 billion for the year to June, and announced that it would pay its first dividend since 2009.

Qantas chairman Leigh Clifford refuted suggestions that the airline's strong financial performance was due to lower oil prices or write downs in the value of its aircraft fleet two years ago, rather than management's so-called transformation program.

"Many airlines are reporting losses or marginal profits despite the low oil price. The transformation, not fuel, is the major difference between Qantas and other airlines in the industry," he said

"Cash does not lie and Qantas' performance in terms of cashflow I think has been outstanding. That has given the company the real strength to enable it to improve its balance sheet and embark on the purchase of the 787s."

However, he cautioned that the global economic recovery and geopolitical environment remained volatile, while the domestic economy had been subdued in the wake of the end of the mining boom.