Former Qantas chief executive officer Alan Joyce has revealed he did not choose to leave the airline when he did, saying instead that then chairman Richard Goyder rang him and asked him to bring forward his departure by two months in 2023.
Speaking to Tracy Grimshaw on Nine’s 60 Minutes, Joyce said he had planned to leave in November that year but stepped down in September instead. “The chairman rang me and said, what do you think of leaving early to short circuit what was happening at the moment,” Joyce said. He said he could have declined the request.
The interview, alongside another by Caroline Overington in The Weekend Australian, coincides with the release of Joyce’s memoir, Riding the Jetstream, published by Hardie Grant and available from 28 July.
Asked how much of the criticism he copped in his final years he deserved, Joyce did not dispute that Qantas had got things wrong. “I think we made mistakes, and I think we got things wrong, and I’ll be the first to admit that,” he said.
Joyce also acknowledged the airline’s customer service failures during the COVID recovery period, when call centre delays, cancellations and lost baggage frustrated passengers as Qantas returned to profit. “At the time, we got all of that wrong in customer service, and we knew it was going to take us a while to recover on it,” he said.
He used the interview to defend Qantas’s conduct during the period the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission took action against the airline over the sale of tickets for flights that had already been cancelled.
He rejected characterisations of the practice as “fee for no service,” pointing out the regulator had dropped that particular allegation, and said 98 per cent of affected international customers were rebooked on flights close to their original departure time.
Qantas was fined $100 million and ordered to pay $20 million in compensation over the matter after Joyce’s successor, chief executive officer Vanessa Hudson, settled with the regulator. Joyce said the settlement was “Vanessa’s call” and described her as “absolutely fantastic”.
On his remuneration, reported to have totalled around $125 million over his 15 years in the role, Joyce said the figure was set by the Qantas board and that he recognised it appeared “unbelievable” to the public.
In a separate interview with Qantas chairman John Mullen, The Chairman’s Lounge author, former Australian Financial Review reporter and Qantas employee, Joe Aston asked Mullen to describe Joyce’s Qantas legacy.
“If I was him, you’ve had a very successful track record of running an airline,” Mullen said. “These things come to an end. He’s got plenty of money, [he] doesn’t need to work. Why not go out and enjoy life and leave the past behind you? If I was him, that’s the legacy I’d be looking for, but if he wants to continue fighting, well that’s his call.”
Joyce led Qantas for 15 years from 2008, having previously built low-cost carrier Jetstar, which launched in 2004 and is now estimated to be worth around $6 billion.
