👉 Background: Virgin Australia was founded in 2000 under the name Virgin Blue and is currently owned by private equity giant Bain Capital. Over the past few years, Virgin Australia has experienced major turnaround with profits over $500m. Over the past few weeks, Virgin Australia flagged its plans to re-list on the ASX at some stage this year.

‍👉 What happened: Now, Virgin Australia has revealed it overcharged 61,000 customers when passengers made changes to their bookings between April 2020 and March 2025. The average over-charged was $55 — just enough to buy a weak coffee and a soggy sandwich at the terminal. So now, Virgin Australia is contacting all customers who are eligible for refunds - totalling $3.4 million. Any unclaimed refunds will be donated to charity… like the good corporate citizen that Virgin Australia are.

‍👉 What else: Right now, Virgin Australia’s leadership need to put their best foot forward because they’re on the campaign trail. Operation: Get Virgin Australia back on the ASX and make Bain Capital a tidy profit.

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‍What's the key learning?

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‍💡 When a company is preparing to go public, everything and anything can influence investor sentiment. And investor sentiment plays a major role in pricing and demand.

‍💡 While Virgin’s overcharging to customers might seem small in isolation, right now, every detail matters. Investors will be looking at whether Virgin Australia is running a tight ship, how ethically they run the business and whether there are any regulatory issues in the cockpit.

💡This ain’t the first major company to have a hiccup in the lead up to their IPO. Remember when Deliveroo IPO’d in London with big hype? At the time, investors were concerned about how it treated gig workers. It ended up bombing - falling by 26% on its sharemarket debut and it has never really recovered. In fact, it’s down 55% since it listed in April 2021.