Speech delivered by Qantas Group CEO Vanessa Hudson on Thursday 28 August 2025.
Good Morning,
Welcome to the Qantas Head Office in Mascot and welcome to those who have dialed in.
I would like to particularly acknowledge our team members who are here today. Having our results press conference here has given more of our employees an opportunity to listen in. I want to thank them and all of our frontline employees for their contribution this year.
After I say a few words, Rob Marcolina, our CFO, will join me on stage to take questions.
We have released a strong result today with Group underlying earnings growing, demonstrating the value of our integrated portfolio across Qantas, Jetstar and Loyalty. We saw a continuation of the factors that drove our strong performance in the first half – Australian’s love of travel continued to drive strong demand; we are already seeing the benefits of our new aircraft; and Qantas and Jetstar had more on time flights and more satisfied customers.
The first key driver that I will touch on is the continuation of strong demand we are seeing. Our dual brand strategy helped deliver value for both premium and low-cost travellers. We carried 4 million more people on Qantas and Jetstar than last year, driving up load factors.
Qantas continued to benefit from the return of business-purpose travel with corporate travel almost back to pre-COVID levels domestically, showing that Zoom and Teams meetings have not ended face to face business meetings. And from an international perspective Qantas is seeing very strong demand for premium cabins and customers are continuing to value more point to point travel which supports our ongoing confidence in project Sunrise.
Jetstar had an amazing year. It continues to open up more opportunities for more Australians to travel affordably to places which were once out of reach, adding 11 international routes and growing domestically. Around one in three Jetstar customers travelled for less than $100. In fact, this week there are tens of thousands of Jetstar fares on sale for $29, the same price offered in its first ever sale 21 years ago.
Qantas Frequent Flyers earned and redeemed more points than ever before. The introduction of Classic Plus drove a record number of Reward Seat bookings. Almost a third of Classic Plus bookings occurred for travel around Easter and the summer holidays.
Despite the strong performance across the Group, we saw some costs rise above the rate of inflation, which reduced the benefits of lower fuel prices, including airport charges, security costs and the impact of same job same pay legislation.
The second key driver was the benefits we are seeing from new aircraft. We took delivery of 17 new aircraft over the year, with more aircraft for Jetstar, QantasLink and the first of Qantas’ A321XLR arriving.
Our first two XLRs are expected to start flying commercial services from the middle of September, making Qantas the first airline in Asia Pacific to operate this next generation aircraft.
We have also today announced an order for a further 20 XLRs for Qantas. Sixteen of these will be fitted with lie-flat seats in Business, a first for any narrowbody Qantas jet, making them well suited for longer domestic sectors like Sydney and Melbourne to Perth and creating new possibilities for our international network on routes like Perth to India or Adelaide to Singapore. They’ll also provide a more consistent premium experience for customers flying domestically and connecting onto our long-haul international network, like Brisbane- Perth-London.
We’re already seeing significant improvements in customer satisfaction as a result of the new fleet. Our people also love working on them and they are delivering the financial and sustainability benefits we expected.
Finally, and most importantly, I want to acknowledge the amazing efforts of our people, who are the real stars behind our results. Their efforts, combined with the investments we’ve been making in customers, we are seeing great outcomes
Qantas achieved its best on-time performance since 2019, with more than 80 percent of flights departing on time in the second half. But we know we still have work to do to reduce cancellations. Jetstar’s on-time performance improved again, up another 3 percentage points.
Customer satisfaction has improved across every Qantas and Jetstar journey touch point, with the Net Promoter Score for Qantas jumping 10 points, and Jetstar up 6 points.
I am passionate about creating a great place to work and a place where our people can do their best work. We are focusing hard on this, and I am hearing from our people that they are feeling the difference. This is reflected in a lift in employee engagement, up seven points, but there is still a lot more to do.
And to ensure our people share in our continued success, today we have announced non-executive employee share plan that will provide around 25,000 employees with $1000 worth of shares every year, linked to our financial performance.
This means that as Qantas grows and our business improves, all our employees will also directly benefit.
It’s now almost two months since cyber criminals gained access to the data of almost 6 million customers and frequent flyers. We’ve put a number of additional protections in place and customers can continue to contact us on our support line about the incident as well as to get specialist identity protection advice.
Before we open for questions, I want to address the judgment handed down last week on the ground handling outsourcing decision in 2020.
First, I want to reiterate our apology to the former employees impacted. I am genuinely sorry for the impact that losing their job and the subsequent five-year legal process has had on them and their families. We accept the outcome and are accountable for our actions.
In December, we reached an out-of-court settlement with the Union to pay $120 million in compensation for former employees. We have also paid the $90 million penalty handed down last week.
I can assure you we have taken lessons away from this that are changing Qantas for the better. We have implemented all 32 recommendations from the independent governance review and the Board and Executive team have been substantially refreshed.
We remain committed to rebuilding our relationship with unions to one which is more constructive. That doesn’t mean we agree on everything, but it does mean we have respectful relationships and negotiations.
I won’t for a second pretend that the job is done, far from it, but the culture at Qantas has changed, is changing – and will continue to change for the better – and for me the most important proof point is what I hear from our customers and our people, who are telling me, they are seeing and feeling the difference.
Looking forward there is a lot to be excited about.
Our continued strong performance and balance sheet gives us confidence to keep investing in new aircraft and customers, helping improve the experience when they travel with us.
Our fleet renewal program increases at pace from here, with 36 new aircraft joining the Qantas fleet over the next two years, and Jetstar adding another 10.
And our mission to operate direct flights from the east coast of Australia to London and New York will become a step closer to reality this year, with the first of our Project Sunrise A350 aircraft set to the enter the final assembly line at Airbus in October.
I want to finish by thanking every one of our 30,000 people across the Group for their enormous efforts over the past year. While we are pleased with the progress we are making, we remain focused on further improving our performance and continuing to deliver for our customers, people and shareholders.
Thank you. Rob and I are happy to take questions.