07 February 2025
7 mins Read
The most common questions I’ve been asked in the past three months are, ‘Have you read The Chairman’s Lounge?’ and ‘What did you think of it?’. To be blunt, Aston’s chronicling of Qantas’ survival of the pandemic and then many challenges and failings on the road to record profits was like revisiting a nightmare for me.
The Chairman’s Lounge by Joe Aston. (Image: Simon & Schuster Australia)
Remembering the pressure of those COVID times for me and my business makes me feel sick. I have great empathy for any travel executive or operator, Joyce included, who was forced to make decisions when faced with these unique and unprecedented challenges. Every interaction either personally or at events I attended with Joyce led me to believe he really did care about the Qantas brand, customers and most of all, people. Most of the Qantas staff I spoke with, particularly prior to 2021, felt very positive towards him. Joyce’s achievements are now largely forgotten and in their place are the disastrous last years of his tenure.
An ABC Media Watch segment on former Qantas CEO Alan Joyce.
And for Aston, a well-known Joyce-hater (he denies this, a claim not many, me included believe) and poison pen columnist, to write his Qantas obituary as a 332-page “scathing, unflinching takedown” is a shame. He damns Joyce with faint praise and diminishes many of his achievements. Aston appeared to take delight in flaying Australian executives in public while his ability to run a business has never been tested.
How can he really sit in judgment when he has not sat in the chair? In my experience, and to quote renowned business podcaster Scott Galloway, “Boards and CEOs are never as dumb as you think they are and you are never as smart as you think you are”.
Investigative journalist Joe Aston and author of The Chairman’s Lounge. (Image: Stephen Blake)
I enjoyed the read but I feel Joyce deserved a more even-handed telling of his story.
Stranger still for me, I attended many of the events noted in the book. Just as the wheels were starting to come off for Joyce and the Qantas brand, one particular interaction I had with former Chairman Richard Goyder distils the entire 2020 – 2023 episode into one fateful sentence.
Qantas CEO Vanessa Hudson alongside Alan Joyce.
This was Goyder’s response to me on the 23rd of June 2022 in Perth. I happened to be standing in line with him at a cocktail event to celebrate the inaugural Perth to Rome flight scheduled to take off the next day. I said I wanted to have a better business coming out of COVID and I asked, “Do you think Qantas is?” He replied in a nanosecond: “Mate, absolutely. We ripped $1 billion dollars of costs out of the business.”
I was shocked. Goyder unequivocally equated stripping out $1 billion dollars in costs with a better business. Yet the media world was awash with negative Qantas stories: lost baggage, inability to use credits, hours-long wait times on call centres, flight cancellations.
Roy Morgan has just reported the Qantas brand had slipped from the 6th most trusted brand in the country to the 16th in just three months. (It was just the beginning of the brand freefall from highly trusted to almost least trusted).
Meanwhile, the courts had decided that Qantas had illegally sacked its international ground-handling staff. Yet Goyder was absolutely convinced that Qantas was a better business as evidenced by the reduced costs.
Joyce’s successor Vanessa Hudson will have to overhaul the fleet.
Aston details many crimes and misdemeanours in The Chairman’s Lounge. These are probably the four most egregious found in the book.
Qantas failed to tell customers they were entitled to a cash refund until the Australian Consumer Commission (ACC) instructed them to be more transparent. Then the refund option was buried in the communication to customers and by virtue of chronic understaffing, made hard to get.
Not only was this illegal, but a bad decision made even worse by Joyce and his in-house legal execs’ intransigence and arrogance insisting on launching appeals within an hour of a judgement. They did not pause to absorb a judgement that clearly indicated they were legally “cooked”, to use a technical term.
Aston suggests the appeals were not designed to necessarily win but to delay any compensation payments to boost profits and Joyce’s bonus in 2023.
In 2023 Joyce was intent on collecting delayed long-term bonuses from 2021 and 2022 when the airline was making huge losses which he had claimed to have forfeited.
For clarity, Qantas’ losses were $1.7 billion and $1.8 billion in 2021 and 2022.
As evidenced by my conversation with Goyder, Qantas didn’t let the COVID crisis go to waste.
Not only did Joyce illegally achieve the cost savings in the case of the baggage handlers, but he also failed to make provisions for the return-to-service costs in staffing, training, and actual hardware.
The disastrous under-investment in customer experience triggered the brand freefall.
Former Qantas CEO Alan Joyce with the Qantas team. (Image: Quentin Long)
Many CEOs would think spinning the message, striving to reduce costs and investment to boost short-term profits to inflate your own bonuses or even claiming historical unpaid bonuses from loss-making years in future profit-making years as relatively normal in the no-holds-barred world of capitalism and free markets. It doesn’t pass the pub test and disgusts me, but many, many CEOs have been far more greedy, ruthless and jaw-droppingly self-serving.
Full-contact capitalism only works when the right guardrails are in place. In this case, it was reassuring that one arm of accountability, the law, turned up and adjudicated the illegal sacking of workers.
But why did it take a union to roll the dice in court, three times, to be the only guardrail for what seemed an exhaustive list of line calls at best, outright greed and disgust for customers at worst?
Aston correctly points out that the guardrails for these decisions were the remit of the Qantas board and, again correctly, in particular Richard Goyder.
Goyder eventually fell on his sword as well, departing 16 September 2024.
Qantas continues to fly despite its brand challenges. (Image: Getty/SCM Jeans)
As for our national carrier? Well, Joyce definitely didn’t kill it as Qantas is still flying.
On the 4th September 2023, the day before Joyce’s early departure, the Qantas share price closed at $5.65.
On the 16th September, when Goyder left it closed at $7.03.
At the time of writing in January 2025 it is trading at $8.86 off a record high of $9.40 on the 13th January 2025.
So it is healthy financially (some would say more than when Joyce was in charge).
There is still some way to go for the national carrier to restore public trust. That’s the nature of trust: easy to lose, hard to regain. According to Roy Morgan, in December 2024 it was fourth in the most distrusted brands. Aussies love Qantas which is why it hurts even more when the flying kangaroo lets us down. But the nadir has been reached (well it appears to have been). In the fullness of time, I think we will fall back in love.
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No thanks, I like to travel solo
Thanks for your thoughts Q.
Very few commentators would have this overall exposure to a brand like Qantas and it’s important part in Australian and International travel. Good to hear views from such a person.
I think the biggest drag on the brand from a consumer, was selling the ghost flights. I think we all bought tickets for a flight and got shunted to another that scrambled travel plans.
The whole board during the Joyce tenure should be accountable, but that did not happen. Goyder was weak and beguiled by Joyce. What about the $2.7B in taxpayers money to prop up shareholders. Disgusting display of corporate greed and all the board took their money.
What a fabulous and balanced article Quentin. It sums up my feelings. The outrage over the actual Chairman’s Lounge was hollow as it is a product that has been around for decades. The biggest disappointment for me was the board which lost all sight of what the Qantas brand embodied and the individual greed that took hold to the longer term good of the company and the brand. The jealousy of Aston and many others that always bag Qantas is sad as nationally they always expect Qantas to be the first to come to the rescue of our citizens despite the cheapest airfare of a subsidised competitor having been the ticket that took them out of the country.
Bonuses to CEO’s should not only be tied to financial metrics but to Customer and Employee satisfaction. If that had been in place Joyce would not have walked off with such crazy sums of money.
I had a ticket London to Melb (the return leg Business upgrade purchased on points) five months before departure.
Three weeks before departure Qantas rang advised they had NO SEAT for me. One would be available in four weeks time. Wait in London or go to another Airline !
I am 75 yrs and was not happy.
They obviously wanted to sell seat for more $$ as it kept showing as vacant !
I previously was a happy Qantas customer as I had a lot of points.
I have lost faith in Qantas, especially over their lack of frequent flyer flights. I read somewhere that they are making more money out of the frequent flyer program than they made running the airline; though probably that was only over a short period of time. I guess Qantas partially got the message and introduced “Classic Plus” Frequent Flyer flights. The “Plus”, by the way, means that they make even more money off them as they are quite a bit more expensive than the “normal”reward flights and, unlike all other rewards program flights, the prices go up, by over 50% in my experience. These flights are run like a low cost airline in that you can’t get them on the same ticket as other One World flights (yes, even those bought via the Qantas FF website) so if delayed you run the risk of losing the second flight as a no show. So after 10 years as a Gold member I’ve switched to Singapore Air adn the Star Aliance.
Mr joyce lost qantas a lot of repeat customers when he took all their points off them and all we were doing was saving them for a trip of a lifetime i have not flew with them since i lost over 180,000 points for saving them up
Goyder was bragging they stripped $1b in costs with a better business, but the real cost was to the brand, staff and customers, all regarded as collateral damage. Amazing how Qantas could sustain losses of $1.7 billion and $1.8 billion in 2021 and 2022, but Joyce continued to get bonuses. WTF! This shows how the fat cows at the top scalp off their “ENTITLEMENT’ regardless. But, they stripped off $1b in costs and sacked thousands of staff jobs. This is the biggest white collar crime in Australia’s history.
I think that Qantas is not just a business on a share market and driven by its return to shareholders. It’s a national brand that has a responsibility to the culture of the nation especially given the handouts it’s been given and the protected market routes to ensure it flourished. Covid losses were always a cash flow issue and the government would always have bailed it out. The nation as a whole would have ensured its long term survival. All perceptions are realities and it definitely looked as though many decisions were made to ensure profit targets were met to ensure ceo and board kpis on remuneration bonuses. I no longer trust this brand. I feel like a no when flying and not an Australian flying it with pride. I once would have felt an immense pride seeing a Qantas plane internationally at various airports. I’m not sure we will feel that again. Given its just a product there are so many better flight experiences like emirates or Qatar or Cathay I’d rather spend with. To add to the insult the whole woke experiences they tried to enforce further enhance my distaste. Time to take away thier route protection benifits they have enjoyed.
Thanks, Quentin—an insightful article. There’s no doubt that Qantas faced significant challenges during COVID, as did many businesses. Unless one was in the senior leadership offices at Qantas, it is difficult to fully understand the complexities of the decisions made during that time. Speculation and criticism are inevitable, and it’s always easy for outsiders to pass judgment, particularly when media narratives often focus on the negatives.
I have been a loyal Qantas customer for many years. While they don’t always get everything right, they frequently do—often going above and beyond. A recent experience reinforced this for me. While traveling to the U.S. with my son for a wedding, our flight from Sydney was initially delayed and then ultimately canceled 24 hours later due to a mechanical issue. Understanding the urgency of our situation, two dedicated staff members at the service desk worked tirelessly to ensure we could still reach our destination in time. Initially, they secured us seats on a later flight via Hawaii, which would have allowed us to arrive just two hours before the wedding. However, while we were waiting in the lounge, one of them personally sought us out with an even better option: an earlier flight on United. They had already arranged for our luggage to be retrieved and rerouted, ensuring we would now land at 12:15 PM—well in time for the 5 PM wedding.
What stood out to me was not just the assistance we received, but the professionalism and dedication of the Qantas staff. Despite facing an understandably frustrated group of passengers, they handled the situation diligently, calmly, and efficiently resolving issues as quickly as possible. It was a testament to the hard work that often goes unnoticed.
We also flew with United, and unfortunately, the experience was disappointing. The food quality was subpar, and two particularly rude flight attendants detracted from the otherwise hardworking team.
I would always fly Qantas but their fares are always more expensive. WHY
I cheer Joe Aston’s factual reporting, insight and commentary. Joyce lost me when he grounded the entire fleet leaving thousands of customers stranded – step one of a long-term plan he quietly set in place for one reason only – to enrich himself. Customers? What do they matter.
I think Alan Joyce showed his disdain for both customers and employees when he decided to ground the entire fleet on October 29, 2011. As an impacted customer this created chaos. The practice of phoenixing new legal entities to employ staff for less money and conditions is deplorable. I was also impacted by flight credits and in spite of multiple complaints no refund has been forth coming (very long story). As an Australian we are stuck – with only 1 national carrier it’s often a choice of QANTAS, a very long drive or an even longer and completely impractical boat. I am a long way from being a willing QANTAS passenger and think of myself as being hostage to limited choices.
Qantas is now paying for a lack of fleet renewal, after giving up options on 75 787s secured at bargain prices!
If they had kept just 10 of them, they would be in a much better position than now.
Qantas now faces a massive capital outlay to renew its fleet.