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.

The Chairman’s Lounge by Joe Aston. Image: Simon & Schuster Australia

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.

For Aston 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.

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.

An ABC Media Watch segment on former Qantas CEO Alan Joyce. Image: Australian Traveller

‘We ripped $1 billion of costs out of the business’

This was Goyder’s response to me on June 23, 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 had 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.

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 Competition & Consumer Commission 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 judgment. They did not pause to absorb a judgment 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 underinvestment in customer experience triggered the brand free fall.

Qantas CEO Vanessa Hudson with her predecessor Alan Joyce. Photo: AAP

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 works only 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 Goyder.

Goyder eventually fell on his sword as well, departing on September 16, 2024.

Qantas flies up and on

As for our national carrier? Well, Joyce definitely didn’t kill it as Qantas is still flying.

On September 4, 2023, the day before Joyce’s early departure, the Qantas share price closed at $5.65. On September 16, 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 January 13, 2025.

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.

This is an edited version of an article that first appeared in Australian Traveller. Read the original here