#Qantas - Their Mad Ideology

The biggest cost of the Qantas "own goal" last Saturday will be in attempting to retain their customer base - which is turning away in droves.

And as usual Qantas are doing it the only way that works - with bribes. It looks like their customer retention activities are going to cost $20 million over the near term. The spinners will be ecstatic - what about the shareholders?

So if you are a traveller who was inconvenienced last week - you can look forward to a *free* ticket. And if you are a Qantas frequent flyer then you can look forward to some *free* points.

The only thing is that Qantas *free* stuff needs to be paid for somehow. My guess is that the rest of the Qantas customer base and the staff will be funding this largesse. It probably won't be coming out of the CEO's pay packet - Virginia.

But the bigger issue is this;

According to his own testimony, the CEO took this decision on his own. He decided to ground the fleet alone and then informed the board - who cheered him on. So the cost of this action is due to his exceptionally high quality "business judgement".

I wonder if his "business judgement" will be viewed so exceptionally when the next profit results are released? And when the share price tanks and the customer and staff satisfaction metrics are next revealed.

That's the thing about ideology - it makes people stupid.