Alan Joyce reveals the highs and lows during his Qantas tenure

Life has slowed down for Alan Joyce.

Most days start with a stroll along the Sydney Harbour foreshore with husband Shane Lloyd and his dog Milo.

It’s a stark contrast for this former very public figure.

For 20 years, he was a corporate titan as the chief executive of Jetstar and Qantas.

But since his early and controversial retirement from the airline in September 2023, Alan has vanished from the headlines.

“After I left Qantas, I agreed with my husband Shane that I wouldn't work for a year,” he said.

“The burden and the stress of all of those years, particularly the COVID years, really I think had gotten to me.

“I think I was the frog in the proverbial hot water, didn't know it at the time.

“And then for the last year I've been writing a book. It’s a bigger task than I thought.”

His memoir is called Riding the Jet Stream.

Joyce wants his say about those turbulent final years, his hasty exit, the court battles and crucially a scathing cultural review.

His book is an attempt to respond to the critics who have said his leadership destroyed the iconic brand.

Small town beginnings

Joyce’s extraordinary life and 30-year aviation career had a very ordinary start.

It began in the small town of Tallaght on the outskirts of Dublin in Ireland.

The Joyce home was full of love and tenacity but money was tight.

“We survived from paycheck to paycheck,” he said.

“I recognise how fortunate I am and I never take that for granted.”

Joyce remembers feeling scared as a schoolboy, fearing people knowing his sexuality.

“I was probably a confused kid in a lot of ways because I was gay,” he said.

“I was worried about being kicked out of home, because I had a neighbour being kicked out when he was 15 or 16 because he was gay, so there was a lot of angst.”

Joyce said at one point he thought about ending his life.

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“Talk about that stress of having to come out to the world, there's a lot of stress in that,” he said.

“But then when I came out to my parents, it was so loving that that changed everything.”

Now in her 80s, mother Colette is still there to wrap her arms around her son and fend off those critics.

“We just gave him a hug,” she said.

Joyce described his parents’ acceptance as “a big, big thing for me”.

He also grew up witnessing his mother’s grit in life, describing himself as “my mother’s son”.

“I think it was your determination that got us through school,” he said.

“And that's where the success came from.”

Rise in corporate life

With that same grit and Celtic blood, Joyce was determined to rise up.

He became the first person in his family to finish secondary education and did a maths degree in operations research.

This decision led him to his first opportunity in the aviation industry.

“A job came up, operations research analyst in Aer Lingus, the Irish airline,” he said.

“I didn’t apply for the airline industry, I applied for the job.

“I have to say that it does get in your blood.

“When you work in the industry, you start falling in love with it, and I did.”

From that moment, the then-22-year-old took the role and started to climb the ladder quickly.

“I usually got promotions to the next level faster than anybody else,” he said.

“I was the youngest manager at one stage in Aer Lingus.

“I had this target of to be CEO of an airline by the time I was 40.”

Move abroad changes everything

n 1996, Joyce moved across the world to Australia, in what was his sliding doors moment.

He was offered a job at Ansett and he took it, which proved to be a move that would lead him to his future husband Lloyd.

“We met at the Exchange pub in Melbourne, which was famous for drag shows,” he said.

“The initial spark was there, just having fun at a pub, but then over time as we got to know each other, we realised our personalities complement each other,” Lloyd said.

Before long, Joyce was poached by Qantas which led to his favourite gig: building Jetstar from scratch.

The budget airline launched in 2004 and has grown into a business worth about $6 billion.

Joyce said without Jetstar he would never have been in the frame for Qantas chief executive.

In 2008, at just 42, he got the top job.

The ‘dog years’

Joyce describes his 20-year tenure as chief executive, including five years at the helm of Jetstar and 15 years in the top job at Qantas, as the “dog years”.

“They are very stressful,” he said.

“There are years where it's the best job in the world and there are years and periods where it's the worst job in the world.

“As a result, you know that you have to be careful you don't burn out, you can only keep this going for so long.”

In his new memoir, Joyce reflects on the good times and heavily defends those controversial decisions made in his final years as CEO of Qantas.

“I think we made mistakes, and I think we got things wrong, and I'd be the first to admit that,” he said.

“I look back at where we were in '19, Qantas was at the highest of high, it had the best customer service rankings it's ever had.

“It was making record profits and I was thinking, what a great way to sail into the sunset.”

His plan was to retire on a high at just 53 but then COVID grounded the entire world.

“COVID knocked us between the eyes and then it became a bit (of a) survival because at one stage we had 11 weeks of cash left before we were going bankrupt,” he said.

“It was the most horrible period I've had in my entire career, 'cause you were making horrendous decisions to make sure the airlines survived.”

But mistakes were made, costing the airline hundreds of millions in legal bills and penalties.

In one of them, consumer watchdog the ACCC sued the airline for misleading passengers who purchased tickets for flights that had already been cancelled days or weeks earlier.

They were essentially ghost flights and tens of thousands of Qantas customers were deceived.

“We had over 400,000 passengers we were trying to reaccommodate through the call centres, it was in chaos,” Joyce said.

But the hardest fought legal battle for Joyce and his leadership team was the brutal call they made during the first year of the pandemic, in 2020, to sack baggage handlers and cleaners and outsource their jobs.

Critics said it was heartless and it turns out it was also illegal.

“We thought the airline was fighting for its survival,” he said.

What got Qantas into trouble was the timing of the sackings, just months before the

baggage handlers' enterprise agreement reopened for negotiation.

If they had waited, the workers would have been able to strike.

Qantas denied it conspired to prevent that.

The airline fought and lost in three courts but it managed to keep its famously hands-on CEO out of the witness box.

Qantas was hammered for it.

Last August a landmark penalty was handed down in the Federal Court of Australia.

Judge Michael Lee was scathing of Qantas and the former CEO, fining the airline $90 million.

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