Alan Joseph Joyce (born 30 June 1966) is an Irish-Australian businessman. He was the chief executive officer (CEO) of Qantas Airways Limited from 2008 until his resignation in 2023, having previously been the founding chief executive of the Qantas low-cost subsidiary Jetstar from 2003.
Born in Dublin, Joyce worked for Aer Lingus and Ansett Australia before joining Qantas in 2000. As Qantas chief executive he pursued an extended program of cost reduction, restructuring and workforce change. In October 2011 he grounded the entire Qantas mainline fleet during an industrial dispute, an action that led the industrial tribunal to terminate the dispute and that drew widespread criticism. After a record loss in 2014 and a subsequent transformation program, Qantas reported what was then a record profit in 2016. Joyce chaired the International Air Transport Association in 2012–13, was a leading corporate supporter of the 2017 campaign to legalise same-sex marriage in Australia, and was appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia in 2017.
Joyce's final years at Qantas were marked by sustained public, political and shareholder criticism of the airline's customer service, industrial relations and executive pay. Qantas's 2020 outsourcing of about 1,700 ground handling jobs was found to have contravened the Fair Work Act 2009, a finding upheld unanimously by the High Court of Australia in September 2023 and followed by a record $90 million penalty in 2025. In 2024 the Federal Court fined Qantas $100 million for misleading consumers by continuing to sell tickets for flights it had already decided to cancel. Joyce brought his retirement forward by two months and left the airline on 5 September 2023; in August 2024 the Qantas board withheld $9.26 million of his final remuneration following a governance review. He published a memoir, Alan Joyce: Riding the Jet Stream, in 2026.
Early life and education Joyce was born and raised in Tallaght, now a suburb of Dublin, Ireland. His mother was a cleaner, and his father worked in a tobacco factory. Joyce attended secondary school at St Mark's Community School in Springfield, Tallaght.
Joyce attended Dublin Institute of Technology and Trinity College Dublin. He graduated with Honours, receiving a Bachelor of Science degree in Applied Science (Physics and Mathematics) from the Dublin Institute of Technology and a Master of Science degree in Management Science from Trinity College Dublin. He is a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society.
Career Early career In 1988, Joyce commenced work at Aer Lingus, the flag carrier of Ireland. He held various positions in sales, marketing, information technology, network planning, operations research, revenue management and fleet planning. He spent eight years with the airline, later saying of his introduction to aviation that he "got the smell of kerosene in my nostrils". In 1996, he resigned to join the now-defunct Ansett Australia.O'Sullivan, Matt. "Joyce ready for great leap at Qantas", The Sydney Morning Herald. Rretrieved 27 November 2009. He had been recruited by the Ansett executive Lyell Strambi to work on route planning, and moved to Australia at the age of 30. In 2000, Joyce joined Qantas. At both Ansett Australia and Qantas, he headed the Network Planning, Schedules Planning and Network Strategy functions. Joyce was appointed CEO of Qantas subsidiary Jetstar in October 2003.
Joyce is a former director of Orangestar Investment Holdings Pte Limited (holding company of Singapore-based Jetstar Asia and Valuair) and Jetstar Pacific Airlines Aviation Joint Stock Company (in Vietnam).
Jetstar Qantas publicly announced the new low-cost carrier, created to compete with Virgin Blue, on 1 December 2003. It was capitalised at about $100 million, ordered 23 Airbus A320 aircraft and was structured to operate separately from the Qantas mainline business. Jetstar's first service, from Newcastle to Melbourne, operated on 25 May 2004.
Jetstar was profitable within six months of launch and had carried more than 12 million passengers by late 2006, when it held about 14 per cent of the Australian domestic market. Qantas separately held 49 per cent of the Singapore-based Jetstar Asia, which merged with Valuair under the holding company Orangestar in July 2005. In late 2006 Joyce launched Jetstar's long-haul operation, one of the first sustained attempts to apply the low-cost model over long distances, using Airbus A330-200 aircraft on services from Australia to Bangkok, Phuket, Ho Chi Minh City, Bali and Honolulu. Joyce left the airline on becoming Qantas chief executive in November 2008.
CEO of Qantas Joyce became CEO of Qantas on 28 November 2008. He succeeded Geoff Dixon, who had been in the role since March 2001.
2010–2011 Senate inquiry on airline safety In 2010 the Australian Senate Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport References Committee began an inquiry into pilot training and airline safety. Joyce was called to testify regarding a 2007 incident that had occurred when he was CEO of Jetstar.
On 25 February 2011, at his first hearing at the Senate inquiry, Joyce insisted safety was aligned in the Qantas Group. He closed his opening statement with "Let me make this clear: at Jetstar there is no compromise on safety. The budget airline model does not require it, and we would never accept it. Qantas and Jetstar have different brands, but are completely aligned on safety. We would never compromise that."
On 24 June 2011, The Sydney Morning Herald reported, "Qantas and Jetstar intend to press ahead with their plans to fast-track relatively inexperienced co-pilots into airliner cockpits, despite a parliamentary inquiry yesterday finding against the practice", while also noting that the Civil Aviation Safety Authority had argued that "there is no evidence to suggest that [the cadet training schemes] approach has resulted in any diminution of safety standards".
2011 Qantas industrial disputes In August 2011 Joyce announced a restructuring of the loss-making Qantas international business, including about 1,000 job losses, the establishment of a new premium airline based in Asia and a Japanese Jetstar joint venture. He told reporters that "to do nothing, or tinker around the edges, is not an option"; the Australian Council of Trade Unions described the announcement as one of the darkest days in the airline's history. Three unions — representing pilots, licensed aircraft engineers and ground staff — took protected industrial action during enterprise bargaining, with claims that included limits on the use of contractors and job-security provisions.
On 29 October 2011, as a result of continuing industrial unrest following the announcement of job losses and structural changes at Qantas, Joyce grounded the entire Qantas mainline fleet.Staff writers (29 October 2011) "Shock as Qantas chief Alan Joyce grounds airline's domestic and international fleet". The Daily Telegraph (Sydney). Retrieved 29 October 2011 The grounding, which preceded a planned lockout of employees covered by the three agreements, cancelled 447 flights and stranded about 70,000 passengers in 22 countries. Fair Work Australia terminated all industrial action in the early hours of 31 October, and flights resumed later that day. Qantas subsequently put the total cost of the industrial action, including the grounding, at $194 million. In August 2012 Fair Work Australia issued a workplace determination for the ground staff covered by the Transport Workers' Union of Australia, rejecting the union's proposed 20 per cent cap on the use of contractors and its claim that contractors be engaged on equivalent conditions, while awarding backdated wage increases and a commitment against compulsory redundancies arising from outsourcing.
The Australian named Joyce the most influential business leader in 2011. Yet a poll following his controversial 2011 grounding of the Qantas fleet showed the action has increased negative public perception of the airline. In 2011, Joyce's remuneration was increased 71 per cent from $2.92 million in 2009–10 to $5.01 million and he was granted 1.7 million Qantas shares under a long-term incentive plan. His reported comments that his salary was "conservative" were criticised by the Australian and International Pilots Association (AIPA).
Losses, restructuring and recovery, 2012–2019 In June 2012 Joyce began a one-year term as chairman of the board of governors of the International Air Transport Association, succeeding KLM's Peter Hartman. An alliance with Emirates, announced in 2012 and authorised by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) in March 2013, replaced Singapore with Dubai as the hub for Qantas services to Europe. In granting authorisation the ACCC said it did not accept Joyce's argument that Qantas International faced "terminal decline" without the alliance.
Standard & Poor's downgraded Qantas debt to sub-investment grade in December 2013, and Moody's followed in January 2014. On 27 February 2014, reporting a half-year statutory loss of $235 million, Joyce announced a transformation program intended to cut 5,000 full-time-equivalent jobs and $2 billion of costs by 2016–17, together with the deferral or sale of 50 aircraft. For the 2013–14 financial year Qantas reported a statutory loss of $2.84 billion, the largest in its history, driven by a $2.6 billion non-cash write-down of its international fleet; the underlying loss before tax was $646 million. Joyce rejected calls to resign, saying: "There is no doubt today's numbers are confronting, but they represent the year that is past."
Qantas returned to profit in the following years. For 2015–16 it reported an underlying profit before tax of $1.53 billion and a statutory profit after tax of $1.03 billion, which Joyce described as "the best result in the 95-year history of Qantas", and paid its first dividend since 2009. In March 2018 Qantas began the first regular non-stop passenger service between Australia and Europe, a Boeing 787 Dreamliner flight from Perth to London Heathrow. Joyce was appointed chairman of the Oneworld alliance governing board in September 2018 for a two-year term. He also initiated Project Sunrise, a program to develop non-stop services from Australia's east coast to London and New York; a Dreamliner research flight from New York to Sydney in October 2019 was the longest commercial passenger flight then flown, and Qantas ordered Airbus A350-1000 aircraft for the routes in May 2022.
COVID-19 pandemic In May 2019, Joyce committed to three more years as the chief executive of Qantas. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Joyce gave up his salary for the rest of the financial year. In June 2020 he announced a three-year recovery plan involving at least 6,000 redundancies, the continued stand-down of about 15,000 employees, the grounding of about 100 aircraft and a $1.9 billion equity raising.
Qantas received about $2.7 billion in Australian government support during the pandemic. Data published by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission in December 2021 showed that Qantas received $856 million under the JobKeeper wage subsidy scheme, more than any other listed Australian company. Asked on the ABC program 7.30 in August 2023 whether Qantas should repay the assistance, Joyce said: "I would say what money did the government give that's money that should be paid back?", arguing that aircraft charter payments were for services rendered and that JobKeeper had gone to employees. Treasurer Jim Chalmers confirmed that the airline was under no obligation to repay the support. From 2022 Joyce said publicly that Qantas had come close to collapse in March 2020, telling an American Chamber of Commerce event in Sydney in October 2022 that "we were staring into 11 weeks of survival".
Ground handling outsourcing and litigation