The Australian Chamber of Tourism’s John Hart says Qantas has been forced to shift into opening international flight bookings as a result of Australia’s state border closures.

It comes after Qantas announced it will restart international flights from the United States and the United Kingdom from July 1.

“What’s happened here is we had Qantas really starting to ramp up domestically and focussing on getting the domestic flights back and they were doing an outstanding job making that happen,” Mr Hart told Sky News host Cory Bernardi.

“But now they can’t rely on that continuing because we’ve had these borders closed.

“So what they’ve needed to do is shift to looking at what they can do internationally, and good on them for moving the date forward.”