Flight Centre Travel Group, CEO, Graham 'Skroo' Turner, at the CAPA Australia Pacific Aviation Summit 2023

Transcript

Graham Turner:Most of the signs we see is the recovery is pretty strong. You know, there's going to be ups and downs, and certainly for the last year or so, you know, demand has outpaced supply, and, you know, particularly in airline seats. So, and this will change, and as— but as airfares then come down, we think it'll be a fairly strong recovery, particularly for the mid to upper market type traveller. If the airfares don't come down as quickly as we think they will, you know, perhaps by the middle of next year, there could be a bit of a tightening of, you know, the lower income people travelling. Okay. Overseas particularly. We have 2 major divisions, that's Leisure and Corporate, in the travel area, and generally Leisure's coming back quite strongly. We have a— within the Leisure division, we have a Luxury division which is very strong, and we don't expect that to vary much. That's a very strong part of the market. Flight Centre, which is more our mass market, And it will tend to be a little bit up and down just depending on the seasons and what the airfares are like, how competitive they are. In corporate, you know, we're pretty hopeful. We're back to 100% of seat numbers of flights as pre-COVID and about 110-115% of actual sales. So Corporate is really going well for us, but we focused during the COVID crisis by, you know, continuing our sales, and we won quite a bit of business during that. So overall, we're pretty confident that that mix of corporate and business and the various different types of business, which is obviously, you know, the high— higher— the big-spending global companies versus the small to medium-sized businesses. The mix is a pretty good mix, and overall Flight Centre Travel Group now, it's what we call a diversified travel group. You know, we're not in one part of the market, we're in quite a few, which makes us reasonably attractive to a lot of our suppliers as well. I feel a bit sorry for Qantas. They're coming out, you know, over the last year, they're coming out of basically a 2-year shutdown, and that is tough for for an airline. It takes time. They've got to get the, you know, crew, they've got to get the maintenance back, they've got to get the planes back out of the desert in a lot of cases. And inevitably there's going to be some issues. And I feel sorry for them. I think certainly some of the things I'm sure they could have handled better, and they accept that now. But the Qantas brand will be back. It'll be— it's one of the world-famous brands and it will be back. It's just how long it takes— 6 months, a year, or 18 months. Yeah, most of the decisions that we've disagreed with have been government decisions, and Qantas has the perfect right to lobby on what they consider is in their best interests, but it's up to the government to do what we believe should be in the national interest, which we don't think they have. Yeah, the Senate inquiry, it's a bit hard to see, not knowing exactly what they're going to look at. I presume they're going to look at some of the Qantas issues. I presume they're going to look at, you know, the capacity into and out of Australia. We certainly— I suppose the main thing that we're concerned about is that we could not see that knocking back Qatar extra 21 flights was in the national interests or in the interests of Australia, particularly when you see the codeshare they have with Virgin Airlines. And at least the inquiry may come out and tell us what was the real reason, because we just haven't heard that yet. And I'm not sure whether that'll help us, but at least if we know, then we might see that there's been some logic to the, to the government decision. Thank you.

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