No apology as Qantas promises to fix customer service

Richard Goyder chairs Woodside and Qantas, both top 100 ASX companies, and also the AFL Commission, which makes him extremely busy. Earlier this year, he spoke of the “incredible job” Joyce had done during the pandemic when many airlines globally filed for bankruptcy. Qantas during that period received close to $2 billion in government support through JobKeeper and other aviation-specific programs.

However, for the past few months there appears to have been a disconnect between the board’s perception of the job that Qantas’s senior management is doing, and the feedback the airline is receiving from both staff and customers.

Complaints from politicians, business people and other customers about the airline’s service have become a deafening roar. Since the start of this year, criticism of Qantas’s customer service has ranged from delayed and cancelled flights – the airline’s on-time performance levels have been falling – to the failure of its multiple call centres to answer calls for hours, sometimes up to five to seven hours, or respond to emails and messages.

There are also complaints of missing bags, including most recently a woman whose bag was missing for four days: the bag contained her mother’s ashes. Her message to Qantas via the website went unanswered, until her partner took to social media. When the bag was finally delivered the thanks wasn’t to Qantas.

Joyce has since conceded the airline has been “rusty” since emerging from two years of hibernation, after earlier this year blaming customers for the airline’s problems, saying they were not “match fit”.

He went further on Wednesday telling Perth radio: “We absolutely are not delivering the service that we would expect to do.”

In a market update on Friday, Qantas told shareholders it had cut its net debt by $1.5 billion in the past six months to around $4 billion.

Then it talked about how it has put on additional resources to address customer service issues and to cope with the school holiday period, which begins this weekend. In the same release, the company said it would cut its domestic capacity by 15 per cent between July and September, amid high fuel prices and staffing issues.

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While the airline quantified how much it had cut net debt, it still hasn’t put a figure on how much it has spent hiring additional staff. Instead, it revealed it would give 19,000 staff a $5000 bonus but only if they accept new work contracts, which offer a 2 per cent annual pay rise, which is below the current level of inflation.

During the past two years Qantas has shed 9400 staff. Since 2010, the number of employees has declined from 37,500 to 22,000.

In the market update, Joyce provided commentary on the departure of Evans, wishing him the best and thanking him for his service. However, Joyce didn’t directly comment on the problems of customer service.

Instead, the release generically said the Qantas group thanked customers for their patience and understanding while the airline works through a challenging restart. Other transport companies and even the hospitality industry have come out of a two-year hiatus caused by the pandemic, but some would argue they are doing a better job at meeting their customers’ expectations than Qantas.

The missing part in Friday’s market update was an apology to customers.

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