In this opinion piece, Travel Weekly deputy editor Sofia Geraghty argues Katrina Barry’s exit from Webjet Group exposes a company caught between long-term rebuild and short-term buyout.
After less than two years at the helm, Katrina Barry has stepped down as CEO of Webjet Group. While the ASX announcement struck the usual polite tone with Barry describing the role as a ‘huge privilege’ and chairman Don Clarke thanking her for her leadership, the context tells a far more complicated story.
Barry’s tenure was defined by a clear ambition: rebuild and reposition one of Australia’s most recognisable travel brands for long-term growth and double Webjet’s TTV by 2030. From a top-to-bottom brand refresh to a renewed strategic direction, her mandate was transformation. It was a mandate she was familiar with having led Contiki through Covid and a similar brand refresh.
As she told Travel Weekly, that challenge was precisely what drew her to the role.
“The reason I took the job is that it’s an iconic Aussie brand that needed a refresh. And I’ve done that before,” she said in an interview with Travel Weekly last year.
EXCLUSIVE: Katrina Barry on Helloworld share buy and Webjet’s plans to double TTV by 2030
But while Barry was focused on the long game, the ground beneath her was shifting.
Within months of unveiling Webjet’s new direction – punctuated by her confident ‘Webjet is back’ message to the Sydney travel industry in October 2025 – the company was thrust into a very different narrative: a takeover target.
Following disappointing 1H26 results, Helloworld Travel moved first with a $353 million bid at 90 cents per share, leveraging its existing 17 per cent stake. Days later, a rival consortium led by BGH Capital, alongside Ariadne Australia and Gary Weiss, escalated the situation with a higher 91-cent offer – triggering a full-blown bidding war.
One of Australia’s most fearsome ‘corporate raiders’, Weiss has a long history of taking strategic stakes in companies and pushing for board or structural change.
Both Helloworld and BGH began building their shareholdings in April last year after the company’s shares dived from $1.09 to as low as 50c.
Gary Weiss’ son Daniel Weiss and former Qantas executive Andrew Taylor mounted an ultimately unsuccessful bid to join the Webjet board, taking aim at directors over their relatively small shareholdings in the company.
At the time, an Ariadne spokesperson argued the lack of “skin in the game” had real consequences.
“This is the cost of having a board with almost no shareholding. When the people spending the money don’t feel the consequences, you get poor capital allocation and avoidable value destruction,” the spokesperson said.
“A 20 per cent share price collapse is not bad luck. It’s the market losing confidence in a board and management that won’t listen.”
For a CEO tasked with long-term brand and structural transformation, it was less than ideal.
Webjet Group was, in effect, being pulled in two opposing directions: rebuild for the future or position for sale.
It was that tension that defined Barry’s tenure. While she worked to reshape the business, external forces were circling with short-term control in mind. Even as it was deemed that neither party presented an offer worthy of going to the Board, the episode exposed deeper questions about the company’s strategic clarity and ownership future.
Her departure also follows closely behind the exit of long-time Webjet OTA CEO David Galt, who stepped down after nearly two decades. Officially, Galt cited a desire to rest and spend more time with family. Unofficially, the timing raises eyebrows.
Because taken together, these exits suggest something more than routine leadership change.
Less than two years after Galt and Barry rang the ASX bell following the Webjet demerger, both have since departed their posts.
Barry didn’t just step into a turnaround – she stepped into a company caught between reinvention and acquisition. And in that context, the question isn’t simply why she left. The question is whether the role was ever truly hers to begin with.
