Mailing out-of-pocket customers ‘pointless’: Qantas

Earlier on Tuesday, Virgin Australia chief executive Jayne Hrdlicka said the country’s second-biggest airline had three types of travel credits in its business.

These included credits booked before the company went into administration in April 2020, the value of which has fallen from $700 million to $300 million as the credits were cleared. She said a further $1.2 billion of credits occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, although just 11 per cent of that total remained.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said customers “should be given a choice when they purchase a product that is not used” and said Qantas should look after its customers.

“There’s no question that that needs to occur,” he told ABC radio. “When people have made bookings in good faith, then they need to either have that money returned or they need to be able to use those bookings in order to make future flights.”

Mr Finch told the house committee on economic dynamism and competition that Qantas’ board took into account customer satisfaction when allocating short-term incentives to executives.

“We obviously have a very large customer or customer satisfaction element to our scorecard,” he said. “On time performance is obviously critical to that.”

On Monday, Mr Joyce faced heavy questioning over the airline’s lobbying against Qatar Airways, as well as outstanding flight credits incurred during the pandemic.

Mr Finch said there was a direct line between customer satisfaction, on time performance and Qantas’s net promoter scores, after Mr Joyce told the Senate committee the board had chosen to award his performance rights based on the airline’s performance a day earlier.

Qantas remains markedly below its pre-pandemic performance and received more complaints than any other company in financial year 2023. An airline spokesman confirmed the board weighs Qantas’s performance against other airlines in deciding whether the CEO has met objectives, rather than overall performance.