Profit more than doubles at Flight Centre thanks to pick-up in business travel

A surge in the number of corporate flights taking off helped Flight Centre Travel Group’s pre-tax profit more than double during its latest financial year.

The Australian-headquartered group delivered a AU$320m (£164.42m) in underlying profit before tax for 2024, a 131 per cent year-on-year increase and at the mid-point of Flight Centre’s guidance range.

The company added that its corporate division contributed a record amount to that total with AU$211m (£108m) for the 12 months, a 44 per cent rise.

Flight Centre Travel Group operates under multiple names in Australia, New Zealand, United States, Canada, United Kingdom, South Africa, India, China, Singapore, United Arab Emirates and Mexico. It also licenses its name in a further 80 countries.

“Corporate travel continues to be seen as a non-discretionary spend for businesses and remains a crucial facet for companies that want to survive and thrive across the Europe and Middle East region,” Steve Norris, EMEA managing director, said.

“One of the key trends we’ve seen, which is in keeping with the rest of the world, is the rise of the ‘bleisure’ traveller – where businesspeople are taking advantage of their corporate trips and tagging a holiday on the beginning or the end,” Morris added.

While Zoom may have replaced face-to-face meetings for a while, they are still seen as essential in building good business relationships, the CEO of Globetrender said earlier this year.

Face-to-face meetings have many benefits, including building trust, fostering ideas and “increasing social capital”, Deborah Mahoney, head of sales, and business development at Americas Amadeus Cytric Solutions, added.

The ASX-listed international travel agency offers a variety of services including flights, holidays, cruises and business travel. It is one of the world’s largest travel companies, with over 15,000 employees.

“[The company’s] result has been driven by high customer retention rates and a large pipeline of new account wins, some of which have yet to be fully implemented, so we’ll see the benefits of these flow over the coming months once they begin trading,” Chris Galanty, Corporate CEO of Flight Centre Travel Group said.

“We’ve also spent a lot of time in understanding the pain points of our customers and we’ve
made significant investments to solve these problems – this has since allowed us to generate
new revenue streams – meaning that we ultimately stay ahead of the curve,” he added.