Slán Alan , hello ....
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Why /how could anyone think she will do a better job.
She has been a part of the rotten top tier for some time.
To have stayed there till now, she either believes the Leprechauns way, was the right way (so no change required): or she was too piss weak to stand up and be counted (which would have ensured her passage out the door.
They needed to get someone from outside, untainted by the filth inside.
Dark days to continue,. Such a pity.
Maui.
She has been a part of the rotten top tier for some time.
To have stayed there till now, she either believes the Leprechauns way, was the right way (so no change required): or she was too piss weak to stand up and be counted (which would have ensured her passage out the door.
They needed to get someone from outside, untainted by the filth inside.
Dark days to continue,. Such a pity.
Maui.
No doubt whatsoever that this appointment was put together by the 1 about to depart as a reward for always nodding her head exactly as required.
I'm wondering about all the talk of returning QF to the good days of the past, resurrecting the great airline, undoing all of Alan's nasty work. Are we talking from the passenger's perspective or the employees? Is the travelling punter's trans pacific experience much different now to, say 1992? Or is it just a lot of pissed off employees wanting the old days back? Genuine question.
I'm wondering about all the talk of returning QF to the good days of the past, resurrecting the great airline, undoing all of Alan's nasty work. Are we talking from the passenger's perspective or the employees? Is the travelling punter's trans pacific experience much different now to, say 1992? Or is it just a lot of pissed off employees wanting the old days back? Genuine question.
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gordon:
From the point of view of a Wall Street investment analyst - their continued employment and salary being determined each quarter, a “reputation” like the Qantas brand is only of value if you can use it this quarter to screw more money out of their customers and thus increase the share price.
‘’For these guys “long term” might be six months. They care not what happens to Qantas or any other asset once they have dropped it from their portfolio.
‘’To put that another way, you can blather on about history, patriotism and loyalty and service all you like; the analyst kid behind the desk wants a new Ferrari and a house in the Hamptons and all he cares about is whether holding Qantas paper is going to deliver. These guys would sell their mothers if there was money to be made.
‘’The same sort of excuses for human beings are preparing Virgin for an IPO.
Staff are pissed because they have had to watch an icon being squandered and the public tend to hate that’s the point.
From the point of view of a Wall Street investment analyst - their continued employment and salary being determined each quarter, a “reputation” like the Qantas brand is only of value if you can use it this quarter to screw more money out of their customers and thus increase the share price.
‘’For these guys “long term” might be six months. They care not what happens to Qantas or any other asset once they have dropped it from their portfolio.
‘’To put that another way, you can blather on about history, patriotism and loyalty and service all you like; the analyst kid behind the desk wants a new Ferrari and a house in the Hamptons and all he cares about is whether holding Qantas paper is going to deliver. These guys would sell their mothers if there was money to be made.
‘’The same sort of excuses for human beings are preparing Virgin for an IPO.
Rear Window 
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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.
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.
Vanessa Hudson, a new Qantas CEO in denial
Joe AstonColumnistMay 2, 2023 – 7.30pmSave
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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.
[size=13px]Will she say, “We take care of our customers and that’s why we’re refunding, in cash, the [/size]$800 million of flight credits they’re finding it impossible to redeem[size=13px]”?[/size]
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.
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I'm wondering about all the talk of returning QF to the good days of the past, resurrecting the great airline, undoing all of Alan's nasty work. Are we talking from the passenger's perspective or the employees? Is the travelling punter's trans pacific experience much different now to, say 1992? Or is it just a lot of pissed off employees wanting the old days back? Genuine question.
On time performance is abysmal. Hidden by statistics.
Service quality is atrocious. Miserable underpaid front line staff, less of them, (no service desk at most airports) in economy the pax get thrown a biscuit or a “gay pride cookie”. Gone are the days of hot meals in economy, choice of drinks and I do mean choice.
Work experience kids running ground handling services.
One aircraft was pushed back twice in one day with the park brake on. I bet that happens regularly, how many reports can one man submit?
always late, bags lost, not enough staff rostered on.
That’s a few items. I will leave maintenance for another post.
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After a family connection to QF going back more than 40 years,...its a very big NO from my Family & I,...those of us with Staff travel don't use it, There are far better offerings available, and thats also ignoring the ME3 on principle
VH will be walking into a $hit storm, old fleet, pi$$ed off customers, the impending recession that will hit airlines hard. I just hope she has a plan and does not continue with the virtue signaling. I wonder is she will approach the gov for a few hundred million to support Albo like the AFL benefited.
Surely her first decision must be to revisit the 2005 order for 65 787s plus 50 options which from memory were locked in at launch prices. It's scandalous that almost 20 years later only 14 787s have been purchased and market share is being gifted to competitors
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She is worse than an accountant, she’s an auditor - as the old joke says: auditors are people who don’t have enough personality to be an accountant.
‘’That said, everything she sees is measured in dollars and cents and her only tool, being a bean counter, is the pencil. She will cut costs even further than Joyce did because cost cutting is all she knows.
The Qantas strategy for 40 years has been simple:
1. Trade on the innate patriotism of Australians by dosing them with soft feel good nationalism in very effective marketing campaigns.
2. Develop very effective Government lobbying capabilities using (1) + freebie like the chairman’s lounge. That allowed QF to run a virtual monopoly for forty+ years.
3. Screw every last drop of blood from Australian travellers: domestic and international on the strength of its reputation and monopoly position.
And screw us they did. I was paying $7000+ for two economy tickets to europe in the 70’s when American teenagers were choking London on weekends - they were paying a few hundred dollars in airfares while we were forced to pay about twice the going rate.
Dont get me started on their Sydney-centric bias.
Qantas has been an unmitigated disaster for the Australian economy. We are a trading country. We need cheap and copious travel options to everywhere, both for ourselves and international visitors. Hell will freeze over before Qantas delivers anything of value to Australia.
In the 70’s, I would automatically make QF my first choice, such was their market position.
Since a disastrously expensive and bad experience of Qantas business class circa 2001 and new appreciation of just how rotten and expensive compared to others, and the negative effect Qantas was having on the Australian economy, I gave them away except when forced.
‘’That said, everything she sees is measured in dollars and cents and her only tool, being a bean counter, is the pencil. She will cut costs even further than Joyce did because cost cutting is all she knows.
The Qantas strategy for 40 years has been simple:
1. Trade on the innate patriotism of Australians by dosing them with soft feel good nationalism in very effective marketing campaigns.
2. Develop very effective Government lobbying capabilities using (1) + freebie like the chairman’s lounge. That allowed QF to run a virtual monopoly for forty+ years.
3. Screw every last drop of blood from Australian travellers: domestic and international on the strength of its reputation and monopoly position.
And screw us they did. I was paying $7000+ for two economy tickets to europe in the 70’s when American teenagers were choking London on weekends - they were paying a few hundred dollars in airfares while we were forced to pay about twice the going rate.
Dont get me started on their Sydney-centric bias.
Qantas has been an unmitigated disaster for the Australian economy. We are a trading country. We need cheap and copious travel options to everywhere, both for ourselves and international visitors. Hell will freeze over before Qantas delivers anything of value to Australia.
In the 70’s, I would automatically make QF my first choice, such was their market position.
Since a disastrously expensive and bad experience of Qantas business class circa 2001 and new appreciation of just how rotten and expensive compared to others, and the negative effect Qantas was having on the Australian economy, I gave them away except when forced.
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She is worse than an accountant, she’s an auditor
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If you own Qantas shares, sell them now. There will be the usual first financial year clean out that new CEOs do. Financial clean out that is. All skeletons are brought out and thrown out.
no doubt as CFO she is well aware of exactly what she will do and will be using the time until November to plan her moves.
these will include writing off or writing down any assets that are potentially over valued. This can include software.
work out redundancies. So that any redundancy expense is out through in the first financial year.
the whole idea is to bring everything that could potentially be bad news in future years into the first financial year. Also slash staff costs and make sure the redundancy expenses which can be significant are out through.
so in her second financial year she can then turn around and say how well she has done because profits are higher than that disastrous first year. Look how good I am.
standard procedure for any new CEO and with 15 years of Joyce I imagine there are plenty of skeletons.
so expect redundancies first half of next year.. and a lower than expected profit result.
if you want to buy back shares, wait until the start of her second financial year after the first years bad profit has been announced and the share price takes a hit.
no doubt as CFO she is well aware of exactly what she will do and will be using the time until November to plan her moves.
these will include writing off or writing down any assets that are potentially over valued. This can include software.
work out redundancies. So that any redundancy expense is out through in the first financial year.
the whole idea is to bring everything that could potentially be bad news in future years into the first financial year. Also slash staff costs and make sure the redundancy expenses which can be significant are out through.
so in her second financial year she can then turn around and say how well she has done because profits are higher than that disastrous first year. Look how good I am.
standard procedure for any new CEO and with 15 years of Joyce I imagine there are plenty of skeletons.
so expect redundancies first half of next year.. and a lower than expected profit result.
if you want to buy back shares, wait until the start of her second financial year after the first years bad profit has been announced and the share price takes a hit.
John Thomas was seriously unremarkable, the VA board disliked his 2IC performance at VA so much they sacked him after not even a year and gave the job to the Tigerair CEO
Slang for penis. For further confirmation of this definition view Austin Powers II The spy who shagged me during the rocket scene.
Would you look at the Jon Thomas on that guy!! He is hung like a horse...wait, he is a horse.