There are plenty of big questions for the airline’s next chief executive – including what the carrier will look like, and how it will be owned, in the long run.
As Jayne Hrdlicka heads for the departure lounge at Virgin Australia, her successor will need to grapple with an airline that, while profitable, lacks a compelling reason for Australians to love it. Sandwiched between Qantas and its low-cost carrier Jetstar, Hrdlicka has made great strides in simplifying Virgin’s proposition.
On the low-cost side, Jetstar’s on-time performance and reliability is now within cooee of Virgin and Qantas, meaning it could more easily capture some of the small and medium-sized business travel segment that Virgin has snared. Singapore Airlines has undoubtedly been burned in Australia as an investor in previous iterations of Virgin, with some questioning whether it would ever want to come back.
Then there is Qatar Airways, which was famously rebuffed in its advances to build Virgin into a much bigger competitor to Qantas when the Transport Minister Catherine King denied its bid to double international flights out of major east coast airports because it was “
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