Men Who Killed Qantas - Matthew Benns [60]
Joyce went away and spent a week ‘pressure testing’ a business model with old Aer Lingus boss Conor McCarthy, before putting a detailed business plan before the board in October 2003. It was given the go-ahead, using the old Impulse Boeing 717 fleet as the basis of the new airline. Joyce took inspiration from the hugely successful Ryanair, even employing a couple of its former executives to help build the business model. ‘Jetstar sought to adopt the efficiency of Ryanair,’ Joyce said. ‘Ryanair has also achieved notable success with their direct ticket sales via the internet.’14 He mimicked the lightning fast 25-minute plane turnaround of Ryanair, which was five minutes faster than Virgin Blue and ten minutes faster than Qantas. This maximised the use of the plane and cut down on crew stopovers.
Free seating also helped. ‘Our free seating process saves Jetstar around five minutes on each aircraft turn, helps return a flight crew to its home operating base by shift’s end … and overall allows for tighter scheduling across our network,’ Joyce said. ‘Despite free seating being an entrenched feature of some of the world’s most profitable carriers outside of Qantas – such as Southwest, Ryanair and most recently AirAsia – the net benefits to Jetstar and our customer base have far outweighed the negative PR the procedure originally produced.’15 It was all about timing. Making customers collect their own bags and check them in again for the next flight also saved Jetstar vital minutes. ‘The infamous Irish boss of Ryanair, Michael O’Leary, has proclaimed he would rather catch a social disease than introduce connectivity on his airline,’ Joyce told assembled aviation hacks at the National Aviation Press Club. ‘Whilst I don’t feel that level of passion about this issue, non-connectivity is core to our low-cost culture at Jetstar.’ 16
The major thing that Jetstar did not take from Ryanair was its customer service policy. Jetstar spokesman Simon Westaway said: ‘Ryanair is notorious for its level of customer service – or lack of it. We sought not to go down that path. We are very aware of our customers and their needs and you just wouldn’t get away with what Ryanair does in Australia.’17
Jetstar was jubilant, with roaring internet sales even before a white and orange jet had left the hangar. ‘We had the most successful launch of any low-cost carrier, we believe, in the history of aviation,’ said Joyce, pointing to the 98,000 bookings taken on the website on the first day of its launch.18 Virgin Blue’s head of communications, David Huttner, begrudgingly snarled: ‘If you were gifted fourteen aircraft that moved out of the mother fleet, you would have some success. For a rooster that is yet to fly, he [Joyce] is doing a lot of crowing.’19
Jetstar was launched on the back of a funny and popular $15 million advertising campaign featuring the comedienne Magda Szubanski. Qantas ambassador and Hollywood star John Travolta was on hand to unveil the first Jetstar jet – although, for a while, it looked as though the veil would never come off, and Travolta had to ad lib until it finally slid away to reveal the new plane. Two weeks later the first Jetstar flight, JQ371, took off, flying from Newcastle to Melbourne on 25 May 2004. By July Jetstar was flying over 100 flights a day with an average of three-quarters of the seats full.
But there were niggling problems. Passengers complained when they failed to check in 30 minutes before the flight and automatically forfeited their cut-price ticket. The internet ticketing also upset travel agents. Jetstar, sticking to its European