Virgin boss Jayne Hrdlicka outlines plans for airline’s future

Virgin Australia will continue to operate out of Brisbane as the airline’s new boss outlines a plan for the business to reach out to Australia’s travel ‘heartland’.

New Virgin Australia boss Jayne Hrdlicka is committed to keeping the airline’s headquarters in Brisbane and wants premiers to create a national plan to reopen all borders.

Speaking to The Courier-Mail on her first day in the top job, Ms Hrdlicka outlined a plan for Virgin to compete for the “mid-market heartland” of Australian travellers, offering “premium touches” at affordable prices.

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Ms Hrdlicka said there was great uncertainty about the airline market “coming out of COVID” but it was clear customers would be “much more price conscious than they’ve ever been before”.

Jayne Hrdlicka at Brisbane Airport on her first day as CEO at Virgin Australia. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

“They will expect us to have very sharp prices to make it possible for them to do the things that they want to do both in their personal lives and in growing their businesses,” she said.

Virgin has committed to retaining “core lounges”, a three class cabin and improving technology for check-in and baggage drop.

But other operational decisions are on hold as the airline “researches” what its most loyal customers want to keep and change about its service.

Ms Hrdlicka said being in administration had allowed Virgin to “fix a lot of the sins of the past” and cut costs but that process was “not finished yet”.

“We have to be in a position where our costs are very low, where our costs are tightly managed and we use good discipline in the way we make decisions because that is what will enable us to take the ups and downs in they industry,” she said.

She said Virgin’s current schedule was “built around where consumers want to fly” with future routes to be worked out using a rigorous analytic process but also heavily dependent on borders reopening.

“We think it’s possible to be safe and secure and to manage COVID while also opening up state borders and doing a good job of managing the virus as we go,” she said.

Ms Hrdlicka, who used to run Jetstar, was hand-picked as Virgin’s CEO and managing director by her former employer, US private equity giant Bain Capital, which on Tuesday finalised a $3.5bn purchase of the airline, taking it out of seven months of voluntary administration.

During that time, the company has shed 3500 jobs leaving it with about 6000 employees. Ms Hrdlicka said that headcount was what Virgin wanted to see as “the industry comes back and we have the same level of flying as we had in 2019”.

“That’s going to take some time to get to unfortunately just because of the border dynamic but once vaccines have been rolled out, borders are opened internationally et cetera, we’re really confident we’ll be at 6000 and we’d like to keep growing from there,” she said.

Ms Hrdlicka said even before COVID, Virgin had “been in a lot of trouble” with former CEO Paul Scurrah inheriting a “really tough lie of the ball”.

“Costs were too high and they were structurally difficult to change because of the contracts that had been entered into over time,” she said.

“So if it wasn’t COVID it was going to be something else that pushed the airline into administration and it wasn’t going to take much.”

Her comments put her at odds with Mr Scurrah who recently said Virgin had not traded its way into administration and would have survived if the pandemic had not smashed the industry.