Things that give you the sh1ts

[Lightning McQueen]

The split system in my office backs up to the one in the chicks office next to mine.

Apparently we have to have it both on the same setting, the temp can differ though.

Mine wouldn’t work this arvo, I go check on hers and she has it on 29 and heat!

[mighty_tiger_79]

The split system in my office backs up to the one in the chicks office next to mine.

Apparently we have to have it both on the same setting, the temp can differ though.

Mine wouldn’t work this arvo, I go check on hers and she has it on 29 and heat!

Get in before her and beat her to the split system??

[gadj1976]

Any irony in Vanessa Hudson becoming the CEO of Qantas, with a background as Chief Customer Officer, when Qantas' customer service is at an all time low in the public's eyes?

Maybe the new CCO will be more attuned to what the customer's actually want.... flights leaving on time, baggage arriving at the destination they ask it to appear at... for starters?

[Jimmy_041]

Vanessa Hudson, a new Qantas CEO in denial
Joe Aston
Columnist
May 2, 2023 – 7.30pm

“While I say it’s never easy, the board firmly feels Olivia [Wirth] is the right person to take Qantas forward,” the company’s chairman Richard Goyder told the press conference announcing that Vanessa Hudson, not Wirth, would succeed Alan Joyce as chief executive.

If Goyder is choreographing the King’s coronation this Saturday, the Archbishop of Canterbury may yet anoint Prince Andrew.

In Goyder’s subconscious, where his likeability is king, even the losers are winners.

Hudson responded to her first question as CEO designate on Tuesday morning by identifying her highest priority, as taught to her by Joyce: “Take care of the customers. Absolutely at the centre of everything we do is delivering for our customers.”

It never gets old watching business leaders, just like politicians, obviate the meaning of their words by sheer repetition. If they say it enough times, in the presence of the board and the press, it will be true.

Had Hudson really thought about her assertion, she would be unable to utter it with a straight face.

Will she say, “We take care of our customers and that’s why we’re refunding, in cash, the $800 million of flight credits they’re finding it impossible to redeem”?

No, she’s saying, “Actually, we’ll keep your money for the service we never provided. That’s taking care of you, don’t you understand?”

Customers know very well that Qantas has been shamelessly gouging them, exploiting its competitive position to rob them blind, to charge the highest prices in history for a product and service that is a shadow of its former self. It is why, according to Roy Morgan, Qantas has collapsed from the 9th to the 40th most trusted brand in Australia.

This is the truth that Hudson and Joyce simply won’t accept. It was all in the past. It was pure COVID disruption, cancelled flights and lost bags, and that’s all over. Tragically, Goyder’s ornamental board of directors actually seems to believe this.

“We’ve invested an enormous amount of money, $200 million this year, in getting the [customer experience] back to where it needs to be, and it is back where we were pre-COVID,” Hudson said.

This is another ridiculous assertion. The radical cost cuts and neglected investment are real and customer-facing. When it comes to meal time, nobody flying Qantas in a premium cabin (paying at least 20 per cent more than a ticket on any other airline) will agree things are back to where they were in 2019. Nobody.

This is why institutional investors love Joyce, and why Hudson is promising “continuity of strategy”. But then let’s not pretend that customers are a top priority for outgoing or incoming Qantas management. Their top priority is pushing customers to their outer limit, which ranks alongside telling them what a marvellous experience they’ve had!

The grand irony is that in 2008, when Joyce – the young CEO of Jetstar – took the reins of Qantas, many darkly predicted he would turn Qantas into Jetstar. He proved them wrong for many, many years, until he proved them right.

In his early years, Joyce made smart cost savings that actually improved productivity and the customer experience. A highly visible one was the automated check-in and bag drop at domestic terminals.

Compare that to the failure pre-2020 to invest sufficiently in qantas.com or the Qantas app. Customers now wait hours on the phone unnecessarily, and Qantas retains a battalion of call centre staff, to make booking changes customers should be able to make online in a few seconds. Qantas directors don’t feel this, of course. Their calls never go unanswered.

Joyce won’t accept that he hung around well past his best. “If it hadn’t have been for COVID, I would’ve retired a few years ago,” he said on Tuesday. “When it came to Qantas’ 100th year in 2020, my intent was to look at that as the appropriate time to go … [but] I agreed to stay here for this length of time to help the company get through a terrible crisis.”

Can you believe one man’s self-sacrifice? He stayed on for the good of everyone. Indeed, his final three years of tenure at Qantas were basically a community service. Seriously, someone should nominate him for a second AC. Double Companionship of the Order of Australia would help soothe the ghastly privation of the $30 million he’s being paid for that period.

This was a typically audacious recasting of history. In May 2019, well before COVID, the Qantas board extended Joyce’s tenure by another three years “at least”. The claim that he really planned to retire in 2020 is completely unverifiable and at odds with everything the company said the previous year.

The legend of Alan Joyce is truly spent, and this try-on is the perfect signal. He really did save his best face-plant for last.

Qantas chairman Richard Goyder flew to Sydney for the final board meeting to decide the airline’s next chief executive.

Joe Aston has helmed The Australian Financial Review's Rear Window column since 2012.
He is based in Sydney. Connect with Joe on Facebook and Twitter. Email Joe at joe.aston@afr.com

[Jimmy_041]

The great Qantas flight credit racket
Joe Aston
Columnist
Mar 27, 2023 – 8.00pm

Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce played a star cameo at the Chief Executive Women annual dinner on Thursday in Sydney, taking the stage to draw the raffle.

Mercifully, first prize was not lunch with Virgin Australia CEO Jayne Hrdlicka.

Joyce well knows how to play to his crowd and this one was eating out of his hand.

He acknowledged “amazing female [Qantas] directors” Belinda Hutchinson and Maxine Brenner, he name-checked Qantas Loyalty chief “the amazing Olivia Wirth”, and “the second female CEO of Jetstar” Stephanie Tully (the first was Hrdlicka and Joyce claimed credit for her, too).

Joyce singled out Vanessa Hudson, who was in attendance, as “the best CFO in the country”.

We seriously doubt this endorsement benefits Hudson, but of course, it’s not designed to. Joyce is really saying that Hudson is the best CFO in Australia because she works for him – the best CEO in Australia (“by a length of a straight”, according to Joyce’s acquiescent chairman Richard Goyder).

It’s all very honey-tongued for a credulous audience, but there’s a complete lack of humility beneath it. She’s the best CFO in the nation because she’s in lockstep with me as we rip the faces off our customers.

The truth is that Joyce would have extremely limited visibility of the capabilities of other CFOs in other industries and across the Australian market. He wouldn’t have a clue who the best CFO in Australia is.

Earlier this month, Hudson had her name on an opinion article in this newspaper that she almost certainly didn’t write. She claimed that Qantas received $2 billion of government COVID subsidies when the amount in her own audited accounts is $2.7 billion. She even boasted about the large amount of GST that Qantas collects from its customers!

This is what makes her the best CFO in Joyce’s eyes, her willingness to be thrown on grenades with his name on them. Not so much to protect the company’s reputation, but to protect his reputation, the restoration of which seems to be the company’s driving preoccupation.

In actuality, the first prize Joyce was drawing at the CEW dinner on Thursday evening was a $1000 Qantas flight credit.

Funnily enough, Qantas is still carrying an $800 million liability for unused COVID travel credits owing to its customers from cancelled bookings between March 2020 and October 2021. That has fallen from $2 billion at the peak.

Any credits not applied to a booking by December 31, 2023 will expire and Qantas will retire them as breakage revenue, a pure sugar hit to the airline’s already colossal profits.

Regular (non-COVID) Qantas flight credits expire after just 12 months.

Thanks to Joyce’s lack of capital investment, Qantas’ online experience for customers was already a bad joke, with qantas.com constantly crashing and the airline’s mobile app offering minimal functionality. Qantas is the Spirit of Australia, but its technology stack is borrowed from the government of Cuba.

Unsurprisingly then, the process to redeem COVID flight credits is far from seamless.

Customers must locate the original email from Qantas that contains a Qantas Pass card number, an expiry date and randomly generated password (as distinct from your Frequent Flyer password). If you have a PhD in Advanced Enigmatology, you may just manage to extract these data and unite them with the booking engine.

Completing this on your iPhone is interchangeable with NASA’s admission test. If you are older than 65, your chances are zero. If you are busy, you’ll never outlast the rigmarole.

You can always call the dedicated service centre, if you’ve got all day and all night. Credit holders are far more likely to end up with a broken spirit than a flight reservation.

These systems are visually impossible. Gambling companies have analysts who adapt user interfaces to seduce customers into clicking all the way through transactions. The airline appears to be using similar experts but deploying their acumen in the reverse. The page keeps timing out? That’s not a bug, it’s a feature!

Anyone who has ever tried to do this – or tried (in vain) to use a “complimentary lounge invitation” – will appreciate the maddening folly of this bargain. If I’m exaggerating, why do two-fifths of these credits remain unclaimed?

Self-evidently, every additional step interposed on the process makes it less likely a credit will be redeemed. When there’s an $800 million pure margin incentive for Qantas to make this difficult, how are we expected to believe it’s not difficult by design?

Qantas is in a fascinating dance right now, regularly reminding customers to use their credits, and deploying resources to that end, safe in the knowledge that most of them just aren’t strong enough.

Qantas wants to bank the free revenue but doesn’t want the blowback, riding the fine line between appearing to reunite people with their money and making it maximally difficult for that to occur. It’s actually very clever.

Qantas points to the terms of its competitors’ credit redemption schemes, which are the same or worse. “Everyone’s doing it” has never been a defence we’ve found compelling.

In recent years, Australian governments cracked down on retailers imposing shorter and shorter expiry conditions on their gift cards in order to book breakage on them. The minimum expiry period under consumer law is now three years.

If there are unclaimed monies in your bank account, the bank can’t take them. The same goes for your super fund. Eventually, these end up in Consolidated Revenue. In the case of Qantas, this would be a great way for Canberra to claw back some of the $2.7 billion of subsidies it gave them!

There is a long history of policy in relation to forfeited money – except, it seems, in the airline industry.

Qantas is ultimately charging without providing a service and then proposing to confiscate your money. This is fees for no service, scarcely different to National Australia Bank or AMP charging dead people, except Qantas customers aren’t dead, they just feel dead on the inside.

Alan Joyce announces that Qantas will create 8,500 jobs by 2033.


Joe Aston has helmed The Australian Financial Review's Rear Window column since 2012. He is based in Sydney. Connect with Joe on Facebook and Twitter. Email Joe at joe.aston@afr.com

[The Bedge]

Filthy.. some new real estate has taken over the management of the house I rent - they informed me last Thursday, 10:00am.

Of course I had already made my rent payment for the week.

Now I'm getting texts and emails saying I have two weeks outstanding rent due immediately - despite my rental agreement having payments due on Thursday of each week.. one week for last Thursday, and one for the amount due tomorrow!

******* WILD!

[Armchair expert]

Just waited behind a guy with no lie an inch thick pile of lotto tickets at OTR

and I got drenched on the walk home


**** everything

[Pseudo]

Just waited behind a guy with no lie an inch thick pile of lotto tickets at OTR

and I got drenched on the walk home


**** everything

I bet he bought a coffee as well, the bastard....

[mighty_tiger_79]

Just waited behind a guy with no lie an inch thick pile of lotto tickets at OTR

and I got drenched on the walk home


**** everything

I bet he bought a coffee as well, the bastard....

With almond milk warmed to 63°

Sent from my SM-G781B using Tapatalk

[Dutchy]

Just waited behind a guy with no lie an inch thick pile of lotto tickets at OTR

and I got drenched on the walk home


**** everything

haha, just went to Officeworks to print some footy stuff, dry going in, bucketing down coming out - all my printing now in front of the heater trying to dry it out

[Jim05]

Any irony in Vanessa Hudson becoming the CEO of Qantas, with a background as Chief Customer Officer, when Qantas' customer service is at an all time low in the public's eyes?

Maybe the new CCO will be more attuned to what the customer's actually want.... flights leaving on time, baggage arriving at the destination they ask it to appear at... for starters?

She is a good operator and has had numerous roles at Qantas over the many years she has been there so she is suitable for the role. She is pretty hardline and known for penny pinching as well as being a huge Joyce fan and protege so it will be interesting to see how things pan out. She has a difficult task ahead though as the board will be absolutely wanting to see the shareholders looked after first and foremost so with a huge fleet renewal there will need to be some cost cutting

[Booney]

Just waited behind a guy with no lie an inch thick pile of lotto tickets at OTR

and I got drenched on the walk home


**** everything

You could have gone any time. They never close, you know?

[Jimmy_041]

Just waited behind a guy with no lie an inch thick pile of lotto tickets at OTR

and I got drenched on the walk home


**** everything

You could have gone any time. They never close, you know?

I thought of you guys this morning when my driver parked at a pump so I could go in and get 4 coffees

[Booney]

Just waited behind a guy with no lie an inch thick pile of lotto tickets at OTR

and I got drenched on the walk home


**** everything

You could have gone any time. They never close, you know?

I thought of you guys this morning when my driver parked at a pump so I could go in and get 4 coffees

Did you sack him? Make you get your own coffee. Insubordination.

[Vamos]

Any irony in Vanessa Hudson becoming the CEO of Qantas, with a background as Chief Customer Officer, when Qantas' customer service is at an all time low in the public's eyes?

Maybe the new CCO will be more attuned to what the customer's actually want.... flights leaving on time, baggage arriving at the destination they ask it to appear at... for starters?

I'm pretty impatient but this doesn't bother me when flying. Like most scenarios in life, mistakes happen when rushed and the last place I want anything to go wrong is 10ks above the ground.

[Pseudo]

Any irony in Vanessa Hudson becoming the CEO of Qantas, with a background as Chief Customer Officer, when Qantas' customer service is at an all time low in the public's eyes?

Maybe the new CCO will be more attuned to what the customer's actually want.... flights leaving on time, baggage arriving at the destination they ask it to appear at... for starters?

I'm pretty impatient but this doesn't bother me when flying. Like most scenarios in life, mistakes happen when rushed and the last place I want anything to go wrong is 10ks above the ground.

Besides, a half hour flight delay is two more free beers in the Qantas club...

[Jim05]

Any irony in Vanessa Hudson becoming the CEO of Qantas, with a background as Chief Customer Officer, when Qantas' customer service is at an all time low in the public's eyes?

Maybe the new CCO will be more attuned to what the customer's actually want.... flights leaving on time, baggage arriving at the destination they ask it to appear at... for starters?

I'm pretty impatient but this doesn't bother me when flying. Like most scenarios in life, mistakes happen when rushed and the last place I want anything to go wrong is 10ks above the ground.

Besides, a half hour flight delay is two more free beers in the Qantas club...

Or if you are delayed for 35hrs in NZ like we were recently on Qatar it was free grog the whole time and a couch as a bed

[am Bays]

Any irony in Vanessa Hudson becoming the CEO of Qantas, with a background as Chief Customer Officer, when Qantas' customer service is at an all time low in the public's eyes?

Maybe the new CCO will be more attuned to what the customer's actually want.... flights leaving on time, baggage arriving at the destination they ask it to appear at... for starters?

I'm pretty impatient but this doesn't bother me when flying. Like most scenarios in life, mistakes happen when rushed and the last place I want anything to go wrong is 10ks above the ground.

Besides, a half hour flight delay is two more free beers in the Qantas club...

Not sure how "free" they are when they slug you $540 a year (just got my renewal email today)

[Lightning McQueen]

Just waited behind a guy with no lie an inch thick pile of lotto tickets at OTR

and I got drenched on the walk home


**** everything

You could have gone any time. They never close, you know?

I thought of you guys this morning when my driver parked at a pump so I could go in and get 4 coffees

Did you sack him? Make you get your own coffee. Insubordination.

He wanted to get a stick book too

[tipper]

day 2 back at work after 2 weeks off, which included a cruise of the pacific.

this working for a living is bullshit...