The chief executive of British Airways has just earned himself a £2.1 million ($2.8 million) bonus after he sold 650,000 shares in the airline’s parent company, the Madrid-based IAG Group.
Sean Doyle was brought in to lead the beleaguered British flag carrier in October 2020 after Spanish predecessor Alex Cruz was ousted amidst controversy over how the airline treated its staff at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Doyle’s remuneration package for 2024 remains a closely guarded secret, although the year prior, his basic salary was £670,000. That doesn’t account for bonuses and various incentives, and in 2022-2023, Doyle’s total annual remuneration was reported to be closer to £1.5 million.
According to a regulatory filing, on May 22, Doyle sold 650,000 IAG shares valued at approximately £3.30 each. IAG said that this was connected to a 2022 long-term incentive plan that was awarded mostly in shares.
An incentive for making customers happy
One of the many incentive payments that are available to IAG board members – which include the chief executives of the group’s airlines, including Iberia, Aer Lingus, and Vueling – is a customer satisfaction incentive.
Customer satisfaction is measured in the form of Net Promoter Score in which passengers rate how likely they are to recommend an airline to their friends or family.
In 2024, IAG wanted to achieve an NPS of 28.6 across its airline brands. The group only achieved an NPS of 22.6.
The original creator of NPS, Bain & Company, suggests that any score above 0 is good, while a score above 50 would suggest an airline is doing excellent and an NPS of 80 or above is world-class.
As a comparison, in 2023, Lufthansa reported an NPS of 35, and that was a significant drop from 57 several years before.
Doyle has staked his career on improving staff morale following the tortuous Cruz years, which had followed years of cutbacks by Willie Walsh, who now heads the major industry trade body, the International Air Transportation Association (IAG).
While the jury is still out on whether Doyle has achieved this goal, efforts to improve BA’s lagging operational performance are starting to bear fruit.
The vast majority of BA’s flights are now departing its main Heathrow hub on time, and in April, aviation analytics firm Cirium said British Airways was the 7th most on-time global carrier and the 8th most on-time airline in Europe.
Problems, however, persist in the customer experience and customer service, and in April, I revealed that in the space of just three months, British Airways had been forced to pay out nearly £1.5 million (US $1.98 million) in compensation that it initially refused to offer customers who had suffered lengthy delays, cancellations, denied boarding and lost luggage.
Between October and December 2024, an independent arbitration service received 3,199 complaints from passengers who had been denied compensation by British Airways or had otherwise been unable to resolve their issue by dealing directly with the airline.
During the same period, 2,833 cases were adjudicated by the arbitration service, and in 89% of cases, the adjudicator ruled in favor of the passenger, overturning British Airways’ initial decision to refuse compensation.
IAG’s board member gender pay gap
In 2024, male board members and management committee employees earned an average of more than €745,000. Female employees at the same level earned an average remuneration of just €151,000.
IAG put this difference down to the fact that CEO and chairman roles across the group are only held by males.
