Bain: Virgin Australia needs to be more like Virgin Blue
 

Seems that Bain Capital "would bring back some of the Virgin Blue vibe to Virgin Australia if its bid to take over the failed airline is successful."

“We want to bring back the best parts of the Virgin Blue culture and make flying fun again," says Mike Murphy, who is leading Bain's bid team.

Hope that doesn't also mean a return to Virgin Blue's LCC approach or its low-end customer service.

Bain Capital says Virgin Australia needs to regain "Virgin Blue fun"

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Oh FFS. we don't want fun, we want reasonable airfares and reliable arrival times, no one cares about the current KPI of departures on time, it is arrival we all care about.
Please don't bring back the face painting and the childish cabin crew antics.
The graph shows that "the good old days" were troubled as well.

Carla can lead from the front dressed in a flimsy thinly designed tutu and prance up and down the aisles of the aircraft to drum up business. Unfortunately she is only available for flights between 9 am and 4 pm, so most business travellers will unfortunately miss out on this theatrical fanfare.

The former Virgin Blue cabin antics will be amateur half hour compared to Carla's impending debut.:D

VAH staff who end up working for this "new look" airline should be very afraid once she gets her mitts on the levers - God help us all.

You guys aren't reading between the lines. "Bring back the fun" is a reference to when Virgin Blue first started out. Domestic only, one class cheap fares. They can't say they will be a bare bones cheap ticket operator cause that isn't a headline.

I really hope they get going but without the A2 person.
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Nah, I’d be happy to follow her example and just work 9 to 3 each day.
Although I’d probably have to quit after realising that there’s a bit of travel involved!

Getting back to basics is certainly a great idea.

Employing any failed CEO from any industry, hmmmm not such a great idea!

We all want to see planes flying, whichever turn it takes, let’s hope the world gets airborne soon.

Not sure that wedging yourself into the LCC corner is necessarily a smart idea. You will ceed all high end domestic and international travel to QF and just live in eternal price war hell with Jetstar and all the airports. You also compete with QF on your higher yielding flights. People will pay the extra $10 and fly QF.

I would have thought a Jetblue type of product or some variance on the current offering would have been the way to go.

If a relaunched Virgin tries to compete with Qantas in the business travel/higher yield sector they will be crushed like a grape.

If they stay in Jetstar territory and don't bother mainline qantas too much they at least stand a chance of survival in the short term. Once you have some cash in the bank and not too much debt, then make a run at Qantas.

hahahahh too funny

A bit of history will tell you that before making their last "run at QF" they had at least made a few buck. The days Godfrey then JB started their attack on QF it was game over. Read Sun Tzu's book "The Art of War". all answers are there.

One good thing about hiring Carla. She will wipe out....every....single....one of them.

Thats what Virgin needs. They need every Manager out. Everyone. Gone.

One thing is for sure, those that Carla doesn't fire, will walk anyway after seeing the way she operates. No one needs to put up with the way she deals with people. Arrogant and dismissive are 2 characteristics that have been attributed by many who have worked with her in her previous part time jobs.

I’m assuming Carla is J H😛. Just curious tho where does the name Carla come from?

The game stores are going to be doing a roaring trade, imagine how much face paint and party games they will need crossing the pacific!

Name is C J H

Just interesting there remain "true believers" who think there'll be a VA mk2.

Geez I hope there're right and I'm proven hopelessly wrong.

Virgin made money early on, but then Qantas expanded JQ and started squeezing Virgin hard from below, while dominating the corporate market from above. JB moved upmarket to get out of that pincer (because it would have been harder to cut costs enough to compete head on with JQ, while QF free to keep reaping in corporate accounts). QF dumped capacity on them while matching VA on enough product and service metrics to keep and win back accounts.

If VA tried to go back to a LCC, it'd still have to figure out how to beat JQ while leaving all of the corporate accounts to QF.

You will notice I said "if" they relaunch. If they do Qantas will crush them if they try to compete for premium pax.
Jetstar might let them survive by not competing too much on lower yield routes.

Nothing new about this scenario. Braniff airlines based in Dallas had the same thing happen to them with american Airlines squeezing them from the top and an upstart airline called Southwest squeezing them from the bottom. In the end they couldn't compete against both. If you can ever get hold of a book "splash of Color" it is well worth the read. What is truly amazing about the whole Virgin debacle is that they didn't learn from this as they were the upstart airline undermining Ansett who at the same time were trying to compete with Qantas. What did the VA management do? They put themselves into the middle ground! They then proceeded to take another page out of the failed airlines playbook and operate with too many different types of aircraft Now they are just going to be another case study for future Aviation Management graduates.

Let's not forget skippers were on 120K and FOs on 80K in the first few years of VB. You couldn't help making money with that cost base.