Forget fortress Australia; UK, US and Europe are back: travel boss

Flight Centre boss Graham “Skroo” Turner has decamped to London for a month of meetings as the company focuses on its offshore operations roaring back thanks to high vaccination rates, while Australia languishes in a low-vaccine-rollout Sydney-lockdown slump.

“The northern hemisphere – the United Kingdom, a couple of countries in Europe and the United States primarily – are by far our best performers over the past six months in terms of winning big corporate accounts,” Mr Turner said from London, where he’s been based since earlier this month and will remain well into August.

In November last year, Flight Centre flagged that the strongest recovery was in its corporate travel division, with September 2020 revenues at 18 per cent of September 2019, versus just 8 per cent for the leisure business.

However, the most recent Flight Centre booking data shows domestic corporate travel dropped by 35 per cent over the past few weeks due to the ongoing hard lockdown in Sydney – along with recent lockdowns in wider NSW, Victoria and South Australia.

“We were just beginning to rebuild momentum in Australia before the delta outbreak, and we remain optimistic of the business travel market returning strongly as restrictions ease,” Mr Kavanagh said from his home office on the Gold Coast.

Immediately after Melbourne’s 15-week lockdown ended in late October last year, business travel progressively rebuilt, returning to 70 per cent of pre-COVID levels, and Mr Kavanagh is confident it will get there again.