Investigative journalist Joe Aston’s “blistering exposé" on the machinations of former Qantas CEO Alan Joyce and Chairman Richard Goyder in The Chairman’s Lounge sparked controversy for its precise accusations of greed at the expense of customers and staff through the pandemic.
The most common questions I’ve been asked in the past three months are, ‘Have you read The Chairman’s Lounge?’ and ‘What did you think of it?’. To be blunt, Aston’s chronicling of Qantas’ survival of the pandemic and then many challenges and failings on the road to record profits was like revisiting a nightmare for me.
Firstly, don’t hate me, but I have sympathy for Alan Joyce
Remembering the pressure of those COVID times for me and my business makes me feel sick. I have great empathy for any travel executive or operator, Joyce included, who was forced to make decisions when faced with these unique and unprecedented challenges. Every interaction either personally or at events I attended with Joyce led me to believe he really did care about the Qantas brand, customers and most of all, people. Most of the Qantas staff I spoke with, particularly prior to 2021, felt very positive towards him. Joyce’s achievements are now largely forgotten and in their place are the disastrous last years of his tenure.
And for Aston, a well-known Joyce-hater (he denies this, a claim not many, me included believe) and poison pen columnist, to write his Qantas obituary as a 332-page “scathing, unflinching takedown" is a shame. He damns Joyce with faint praise and diminishes many of his achievements. Aston appeared to take delight in flaying Australian executives in public while his ability to run a business has never been tested.
How can he really sit in judgment when he has not sat in the chair? In my experience, and to quote renowned business podcaster Scott Galloway, “Boards and CEOs are never as dumb as you think they are and you are never as smart as you think you are".
I enjoyed the read but I feel Joyce deserved a more even-handed telling of his story.
Stranger still for me, I attended many of the events noted in the book. Just as the wheels were starting to come off for Joyce and the Qantas brand, one particular interaction I had with former Chairman Richard Goyder distils the entire 2020 – 2023 episode into one fateful sentence.
“We ripped $1 billion of costs out of the business."
This was Goyder’s response to me on the 23rd of June 2022 in Perth. I happened to be standing in line with him at a cocktail event to celebrate the inaugural Perth to Rome flight scheduled to take off the next day. I said I wanted to have a better business coming out of COVID and I asked, “Do you think Qantas is?" He replied in a nanosecond: “Mate, absolutely. We ripped $1 billion dollars of costs out of the business."
I was shocked. Goyder unequivocally equated stripping out $1 billion dollars in costs with a better business. Yet the media world was awash with negative Qantas stories: lost baggage, inability to use credits, hours-long wait times on call centres, flight cancellations.
Roy Morgan has just reported the Qantas brand had slipped from the 6th most trusted brand in the country to the 16th in just three months. (It was just the beginning of the brand freefall from highly trusted to almost least trusted).
Meanwhile, the courts had decided that Qantas had illegally sacked its international ground-handling staff. Yet Goyder was absolutely convinced that Qantas was a better business as evidenced by the reduced costs.
So what actually did Joyce and Goyder do to “sell us out"?
Aston details many crimes and misdemeanours in The Chairman’s Lounge. These are probably the four most egregious found in the book.
1. Airfare credits were treated like a free loan
Qantas failed to tell customers they were entitled to a cash refund until the Australian Consumer Commission (ACC) instructed them to be more transparent. Then the refund option was buried in the communication to customers and by virtue of chronic understaffing, made hard to get.
2. Illegally sacking baggage handlers in 2020
Not only was this illegal, but a bad decision made even worse by Joyce and his in-house legal execs’ intransigence and arrogance insisting on launching appeals within an hour of a judgement. They did not pause to absorb a judgement that clearly indicated they were legally “cooked", to use a technical term.
Aston suggests the appeals were not designed to necessarily win but to delay any compensation payments to boost profits and Joyce’s bonus in 2023.
3. Claiming to have not collected bonuses to only come back and collect them later
In 2023 Joyce was intent on collecting delayed long-term bonuses from 2021 and 2022 when the airline was making huge losses which he had claimed to have forfeited.
For clarity, Qantas’ losses were $1.7 billion and $1.8 billion in 2021 and 2022.
4. Stripping $1 billion in costs for bonuses while ruining the product
As evidenced by my conversation with Goyder, Qantas didn’t let the COVID crisis go to waste.
Not only did Joyce illegally achieve the cost savings in the case of the baggage handlers, but he also failed to make provisions for the return-to-service costs in staffing, training, and actual hardware.
The disastrous under-investment in customer experience triggered the brand freefall.
Is The Chairman’s Lounge a fair report?
Many CEOs would think spinning the message, striving to reduce costs and investment to boost short-term profits to inflate your own bonuses or even claiming historical unpaid bonuses from loss-making years in future profit-making years as relatively normal in the no-holds-barred world of capitalism and free markets. It doesn’t pass the pub test and disgusts me, but many, many CEOs have been far more greedy, ruthless and jaw-droppingly self-serving.
Full-contact capitalism only works when the right guardrails are in place. In this case, it was reassuring that one arm of accountability, the law, turned up and adjudicated the illegal sacking of workers.
But why did it take a union to roll the dice in court, three times, to be the only guardrail for what seemed an exhaustive list of line calls at best, outright greed and disgust for customers at worst?
Aston correctly points out that the guardrails for these decisions were the remit of the Qantas board and, again correctly, in particular Richard Goyder.
Goyder eventually fell on his sword as well, departing 16 September 2024.
Qantas flies up and on
As for our national carrier? Well, Joyce definitely didn’t kill it as Qantas is still flying.
On the 4th September 2023, the day before Joyce’s early departure, the Qantas share price closed at $5.65.
On the 16th September, when Goyder left it closed at $7.03.
At the time of writing in January 2025 it is trading at $8.86 off a record high of $9.40 on the 13th January 2025.
So it is healthy financially (some would say more than when Joyce was in charge).
There is still some way to go for the national carrier to restore public trust. That’s the nature of trust: easy to lose, hard to regain. According to Roy Morgan, in December 2024 it was fourth in the most distrusted brands. Aussies love Qantas which is why it hurts even more when the flying kangaroo lets us down. But the nadir has been reached (well it appears to have been). In the fullness of time, I think we will fall back in love.
