Rear Window
Vanessa Hudson, a new Qantas CEO in denial
Joe AstonColumnistMay 2, 2023 – 7.30pm
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“While I say it’s never easy, the board firmly feels
Olivia [[b]Wirth] is the right person to take Qantas forward,” the company’s chairman
Richard Goyder told the press conference announcing that
Vanessa Hudson, not Wirth, would succeed
Alan Joyce as chief executive.
If Goyder is choreographing the King’s coronation this Saturday, the Archbishop of Canterbury may yet anoint Prince Andrew.
In Goyder’s subconscious, where his likeability is king, even the losers are winners.
Hudson responded to her first question as CEO designate on Tuesday morning by identifying her highest priority, as taught to her by Joyce: “Take care of the customers. Absolutely at the centre of everything we do is delivering for our customers.”
It never gets old watching business leaders, just like politicians, obviate the meaning of their words by sheer repetition. If they say it enough times, in the presence of the board and the press, it will be true.
Had Hudson really thought about her assertion, she would be unable to utter it with a straight face.
No, she’s saying, “Actually, we’ll keep your money for the service we never provided. That’s taking care of you, don’t you understand?”
Customers know very well that Qantas has been shamelessly gouging them, exploiting its competitive position to rob them blind, to charge the highest prices in history for a product and service that is a shadow of its former self. It is why, according to Roy Morgan, Qantas has collapsed from the 9th to the 40th most trusted brand in Australia.
This is the truth that Hudson and Joyce simply won’t accept. It was all in the past. It was pure COVID disruption, cancelled flights and lost bags, and that’s all over. Tragically, Goyder’s ornamental board of directors actually seems to believe this.
“We’ve invested an enormous amount of money, $200 million this year, in getting the [customer experience] back to where it needs to be, and it is back where we were pre-COVID,” Hudson said.
This is another ridiculous assertion. The radical cost cuts and neglected investment are real and customer-facing. When it comes to meal time, nobody flying Qantas in a premium cabin (paying at least 20 per cent more than a ticket on any other airline) will agree things are back to where they were in 2019. Nobody.
This is why institutional investors love Joyce, and why Hudson is promising “continuity of strategy”. But then let’s not pretend that customers are a top priority for outgoing or incoming Qantas management. Their top priority is pushing customers to their outer limit, which ranks alongside telling them what a marvellous experience they’ve had!
The grand irony is that in 2008, when Joyce – the young CEO of Jetstar – took the reins of Qantas, many darkly predicted he would turn Qantas into Jetstar. He proved them wrong for many, many years, until he proved them right.
In his early years, Joyce made smart cost savings that actually improved productivity and the customer experience. A highly visible one was the automated check-in and bag drop at domestic terminals.
Compare that to the failure pre-2020 to invest sufficiently in qantas.com or the Qantas app. Customers now wait hours on the phone unnecessarily, and Qantas retains a battalion of call centre staff, to make booking changes customers should be able to make online in a few seconds. Qantas directors don’t feel this, of course. Their calls never go unanswered.
Joyce won’t accept that he hung around well past his best. “If it hadn’t have been for COVID, I would’ve retired a few years ago,” he said on Tuesday. “When it came to Qantas’ 100th year in 2020, my intent was to look at that as the appropriate time to go … [but] I agreed to stay here for this length of time to help the company get through a terrible crisis.”
Can you believe one man’s self-sacrifice? He stayed on for the good of everyone. Indeed, his final three years of tenure at Qantas were basically a community service. Seriously, someone should nominate him for a second AC. Double Companionship of the Order of Australia would help soothe the ghastly privation of
the $30 million he’s being paid for that period.
This was a typically audacious recasting of history. In May 2019, well before COVID, the Qantas board
extended Joyce’s tenure by another three years “at least”. The claim that he really planned to retire in 2020 is completely unverifiable and at odds with everything the company said the previous year.
The legend of Alan Joyce is truly spent, and this try-on is the perfect signal. He really did save his best face-plant for last.