Virgin Australia chief executive John Borghetti has rejected claims the airline's pilots, engineers and ground crew are paid substantially less than those at Qantas Airways.
Mr Borghetti says there is a five per cent difference between the salary of a Boeing 737 pilot flying a Virgin Australia aircraft and an identical pilot flying the same aircraft for Qantas.
The difference was similar for ground staff, while aircraft engineers at Virgin were paid more than those at Qantas, Mr Borghetti said.
"We don't pay our pilots half of the Qantas rates," Mr Borghetti told reporters after an Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce lunch in Sydney on Wednesday.
"We do pay our people well. Quite frankly, if we didn't and we only paid them half the price do you think they'd stay?"
Qantas, currently in enterprise bargaining negotiations with ground crew, pilots and engineers, has previously claimed unions representing those workers had accepted new workplace agreements with Virgin that had lower wages and conditions than what Qantas was offering.
"The TWU (Transport Workers Union) has negotiated a new deal with Virgin which is 12 per cent lower than Qantas rates," Qantas group executive government and corporate affairs Olivia Wirth said in a statement on October 6.
Mr Borghetti said Virgin moved quickly to add capacity, rebook passengers and keep Australians flying when Qantas decided to ground its fleet over the weekend as part of an industrial dispute with unions.
The Virgin boss said the airline carried about 30,000 disrupted passengers and had a several hundred per cent increase in foot traffic through its airport lounges, exposing the airline's offering to many who normally flew Qantas.
"We've never seen such volumes," Mr Borghetti said.
"We hoping that a lot of those customers will come and visit us again."
He added that the federal government was "nothing but really supportive" of Virgin's efforts, particularly with relaxing curfews at airports or allowing pilots on its Pacific Blue fleet to operate on domestic routes.
Separately, Mr Borghetti said the airline would finish refitting the interiors of its Boeing 737 fleet by the end of the year.
This would allow Virgin to extend its business class offering to the so-called golden triangle between Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney from January 18, 2012.
Currently, these seats are available on east-west flights to Perth from Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney.
The Melbourne-Sydney route was the fourth-busiest city pair in the world and one that was crying out for more competition for corporate travellers, Mr Borghetti said.
The airline said at its full year results presentation in August that 13 per cent of its revenue now came from corporate customers, with the aim to grow the figure to 20 per cent over the next two years.
"I'm very happy with the way it's heading," Mr Borghetti said.
Virgin closed steady at 37 cents.
