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Barbara Ann Cassani, CBE (born July 22, 1960) is an American businesswoman. She was the founder under British Airways of budget airline Go Fly and was the first leader of London's bid for the 2012 Summer Olympics.
Barbara Cassani was born in Boston to James and Noreen Cassani. She studied at Mount Holyoke College, graduating magna cum laude with a BA (Hons) international relations in 1982; and is also a former trustee of Mount Holyoke. [1] Cassani earned a master's degree, again in international relations, from Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. She was awarded an honorary degree from Cranfield University in 2004. [2]
Cassani married British investment banker Guy Davis in 1985. The couple have two children, Lauren and James. She is a keen horse rider, and competes in eventing, showjumping, and dressage events. Since stepping down from the Olympic bid, Cassani has been working on plans for a new startup company, and appears as a business and management speaker on the public speaking circuit. [3]
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Upon graduation in 1984, Cassani worked as a management consultant for Coopers & Lybrand before moving to work in the US operation of British Airways. There, she worked in sales, marketing, and on the team that integrated Dan-Air into BA's business.
In 1997, facing increasing competition from low cost airlines Ryanair and EasyJet, British Airways decided to found its own budget offering, to be known as 'Go'. Chief Executive Bob Ayling selected Cassani for the task, giving her only £25 million in seed capital. The company began operations in 1998 and reached profitability two years later. In 2001, Cassani led a management buyout of the company (with most of the funding coming from venture capital firm 3i), and became its first Chief Executive.
In 2002, Cassani won the Veuve Clicquot Businesswoman of the Year award. [4] Later that year, the airline was bought by rival EasyJet (a move bitterly opposed by Cassani) and she was not offered a position in the merged company. She next released a book detailing her experiences at Go; Go - An Airline Adventure ( ISBN 0-316-72662-1) won a number of business publishing awards the following year.
In October 2003, Cassani became a non-executive director of retailer Marks & Spencer, a position she relinquished when she accepted the Olympic position. After her Olympic tenure, she was one of the executives mooted as taking over as the struggling company's Chief Executive.
In June 2003, Cassani was appointed to chair London's bid to host the 2012 Summer Olympics. The organizing committee felt that her business background would give the bid a badly needed professionalism; the organizational reputation of British sport had already been tarnished when it won the right to host the 2005 World Athletics Championships but was forced to withdraw when the promised stadium could not be built.
Cassani's selection surprised many commentators, as she was unknown in the highly political world of Olympic sport. Although she was married to a Briton and had lived in the UK for more than a decade, her American nationality also raised some eyebrows.
She led the bid through the first phase of the two-stage bidding process. During her tenure, the newly formed bid team grew to a staff of 80, with many large institutional backers, and gained increasing approval from a sceptical British public and political class. Her team created the bid's master plan, which detailed where events would be held, what infrastructure would be built, and provided an overall budget projection for the Games. This was submitted to the International Olympic Committee in the spring of 2004, and on the strength of it London was selected as one of the five candidate cities.
In March 2004, The Daily Telegraph diary column printed claims that Cassani had been highly critical of Tony Blair, saying "To be frank he wasn't very bright ... the subject he got most animated about was beach volleyball." Cassani sued for libel saying that the story was not only completely without foundation but also highly damaging to the bid; on April 21, the Telegraph admitted that she had made none of the remarks attributed to her, and agreed to apologise in print, pay her costs, and make a donation to the Olympic bid committee.
In May 2004, Cassani announced she was stepping down as chairman in favour of Olympic gold medallist and politician Lord Coe, saying that she felt the bid had reached a stage where his track record in the Olympic movement would be more useful to the bid than her technical and managerial experience. Some commentators felt, however, that her departure had been precipitated by internal politics in the British sports establishment. Pierre-Yves Gerbeau, whom she had appointed as the bid's ambassador, quit the effort shortly after she stepped down, saying the way Cassani had been treated was "shocking." [5]
Cassani stayed on with the bid, serving under Coe as Vice Chairman responsible for technical aspects of the bid. She continued to serve on the board (working unpaid one day per week); the IOC awarded the XXXth Olympiad to London on 6 July 2005.
On 24 September 2007, Cassani became the new chairman of the board at Vueling Airlines, replacing Jose Miguel Abad Silvestre, who resigned abruptly citing "managerial differences." Vueling, founded in 2004, is an airline based in Barcelona, Spain, whose share value in the stock market had dropped by 30% earlier in 2007. Board members Jose Creuheras Margenat and Ferran Conti Penina also resigned. [6] Since 2013, Vueling has been part of International Airlines Group which also owns British Airways. Cassani was appointed Executive Chairperson of Jurys Inn hotels in 2008.
British Airways (BA) is the flag carrier airline of the United Kingdom. It is headquartered in London, England, near its main hub at Heathrow Airport.
Go Fly was the name of a British low-cost airline, founded by British Airways in 1998. It operated flights between London Stansted Airport and destinations in Europe. The airline was purchased from BA in a management buyout backed by the private equity firm 3i in 2001. In 2002, it was bought by its rival EasyJet and was merged into that airline's operations by 2005.
EasyJet plc is a British multinational low-cost airline group headquartered at London Luton Airport. It operates domestic and international scheduled services on 927 routes in more than 34 countries via its affiliate airlines EasyJet UK, EasyJet Switzerland, and EasyJet Europe. EasyJet plc is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 250 Index. EasyGroup Holdings Ltd, the investment vehicle of the airline's founder, Greek-Cypriot businessman Stelios Haji-Ioannou, is the largest shareholder with a 15.27% stake. It employs circa 13,000 people, based throughout Europe but mainly in the UK.
Flybe, styled as flybe, was a British airline based in Exeter, England. Until its sale to Connect Airways in 2019, it was the largest independent regional airline in Europe. Flybe once provided more than half of UK domestic flights outside London.
Olympic Airlines, formerly named Olympic Airways, was the flag carrier airline of Greece. The airline's head office was located in Athens. The airline operated services to 37 domestic destinations and to 32 destinations world-wide. The airline's main base was at Athens International Airport, "Eleftherios Venizelos", with hubs at Thessaloniki International Airport, "Macedonia", Heraklion International Airport, "Nikos Kazantzakis" and Rhodes International Airport, "Diagoras". Olympic Airlines also owned a base at London Heathrow Airport. By December 2007, the airline employed about 8,500 staff.
Detta O'Cathain, Baroness O'Cathain, was an Irish-born British businesswoman and Conservative politician.
Vueling S.A. is a Spanish low-cost airline based at El Prat de Llobregat in Greater Barcelona with hubs at Barcelona–El Prat Airport (main), Paris-Orly Airport in Paris, France and Leonardo da Vinci–Fiumicino Airport in Rome, Italy (secondary). It is the largest airline in Spain, measured by fleet size and number of destinations. As of 2021, Vueling serves 122 destinations in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East, and carried more than 34 million passengers in 2019. Since 2013, it has been an operating company of International Airlines Group, the parent company of British Airways and Iberia.
DBA Luftfahrtgesellschaft mbH, founded as Delta Air and formerly branded as Deutsche BA, was a low-cost airline headquartered on the grounds of Munich Airport in a building within the municipality of Hallbergmoos, Germany. It operated scheduled domestic and international services and also operated charter flights for tour operators in Europe and North Africa.
Robert John Ayling, also known as Bob Ayling, is a British retired lawyer and businessman who has worked with a variety of high-profile companies and organisations. From 1996 to 2000, he was the CEO of British Airways. He also served as chairman of Her Majesty's Courts and Tribunals Service, Dŵr Cymru, and Dyson. Ayling was appointed a CBE in the Queen's 2018 Birthday Honors List.
GB Airways was a British airline; prior to its sale, it was headquartered in "The Beehive," a former terminal building, at City Place Gatwick, London Gatwick Airport in Crawley, West Sussex, England.
The European Low Fares Airline Association (ELFAA) was an organization formed in 2004 to represent low-cost carriers and lobby European institutions on their behalf. It ceased operations and disbanded in 2016, as major members joined the newly formed trade group Airlines for Europe. ELFAA was based in Brussels, Belgium.
Aviapartner, whose origins date back to 1949 under the name of Herfurth Air Services to become 'Belgavia' in the late 1960s, is a Belgian company that provides ground handling services at 37 airports in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and The Netherlands. Among the airports served are Amsterdam, Brussels, Milan, Düsseldorf, Rome, Nice, Toulouse and Málaga.
Bonny Warner is an American luger who competed from the early 1980s to the early 1990s. She later competed in women's bobsleigh from 1999 to 2002. She was a pilot for United Airlines from 1990 to 2004, when she quit United and went to work for JetBlue Airways.
Dame Carolyn Julia McCall is a British businesswoman of Scottish and Irish descent. She has been the chief executive of ITV since 2018. She previously served as the chief executive of easyJet from 2010 to 2017.
Simon Paul Clegg CBE is a British sports businessmen. He has been Chief Executive of the British Olympic Association, a Championship Football Club and a European Youth Olympic Festival. He was Chief Operating Officer of the inaugural 2015 European Games in Baku and also managed the British Biathlon Team and Team GB athletes at twelve Summer and Winter Olympic Games. In addition he orchestrated the national political and PR campaigns to persuade the Government and Mayor of London to bid for the 2012 Olympic Games.
Sir Martin Faulkner Broughton is a British businessman and deputy chairman of International Airlines Group. Formed in January 2011, IAG is the parent company of British Airways, Iberia and Vueling. It is a Spanish registered company with shares traded on the London Stock Exchange and Spanish Stock Exchanges. The corporate head office for IAG is in London, UK. He is also a Managing Partner at Sports Investment Partners and chairman of the sports virtual advertising company Supponor. He is a former chairman of Liverpool Football Club and also served as President of the Confederation of British Industry.
International Consolidated Airlines Group S.A., trading as International Airlines Group and usually shortened to IAG, is an Anglo-Spanish multinational airline holding company with its registered office in Madrid, Spain, and its global headquarters in London, England. It was formed in January 2011 after a merger agreement between British Airways and Iberia, the flag carriers of the United Kingdom and Spain respectively, when British Airways and Iberia became wholly owned subsidiaries of IAG. British Airways shareholders were given 55% of the shares in the new company.
Álex Cruz de Llano is a Spanish businessman, former chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) of British Airways and former CEO of Vueling.