The future of the travel industry is looking up, with Flight Centre CEO Graham Turner expecting his travel group to be back in the black by April this year.
Speaking at the QUT Business Leaders’ Forum today, Mr Turner said although his global travel business took a massive hit from the pandemic, dropping from $24.4 billion in pre-COVID sales to about $6 billion in the last financial year, and losing around 14,000 staff, the crisis had forced a valuable business reset.
“We’ve had to reimagine the whole business. During COVID we spent a lot of time, effort and money improving our technology…so when we come back to pre-COVID sales, which we believe will be in 18 months to two years…we won’t come back with the same numbers of people and the same costs,” Mr Turner said.
Mr Turner urged employees who had been made redundant to come back to the fold as the travel industry picked up, but said his management team had worked hard to streamline operations to ensure consistent business practices world-wide.
“Post-COVID we’re trying to standardise a lot more within all our brands. We still see a long way to go in that. We can’t afford to duplicate a lot of things around the world like we could two or three years ago,” he said.
Mr Turner said the key to his business’s success was to employ “self-drivers — empowered, resilient people”, and getting them to follow the company formula.
“We’ve spent a lot of time and money on technology that will make people more productive, and will improve the experience for our customers, particularly in corporate travel.
“Coming out of this we’ll be in some ways in a much better position,” Mr Turner said.
Mr Turner said Flight Centre had made it through the pandemic thanks to the commitment of a key team of seven executives across three continents.
“In March 2002 we immediately set up a war room and for the next two months we met every day, seven days a week, planning for our survival. It really was about having a leadership team where everyone pulled their weight.
“We will survive this and will prosper coming out of it with the changes that we’ve made.”
