Flight Centre Travel Group (FCTG) co-founder and boss Skroo Turner has defended Virgin Australia’s chief Jayne Hrdlicka after she said “some people may die” earlier in the week by saying that borders should open as soon as possible.
In an interview on The AM Show in New Zealand, Skroo Turner said people died from flu, road accidents and smoking, and that COVID-19 was just another minor risk in the country that people would learn to live with.
He said some of the criticism of Hrdlicka’s was unfair because her comments had been taken out of context, as she meant once people got vaccinated and started to travel again, the virus would be endemic.
“Basically she was saying, once the vast majority of the population are vaccinated and particularly the vulnerable section of the population and people start travelling again, the virus is going to be endemic and some people are going to die from it,” he said.
“About 2000 people in Australia in a normal year die from the flu. Thousands of people die from road accidents. I know in the United States hundreds of thousands of people die from smoking.
“So, it’s just another one of those minor risk factors in the country that we’re going to have to learn to live with and I think Jayne was probably a bit victimised. Things were just taken a little bit out of context… I thought her argument was quite a valid one.”
Both New Zealand and Australia had been too conservative on their vaccination schemes Mr Tutner stressed, which he said would be the key to safe travel and borders reopening.
“The US has got something like 60 or 70 per cent at least with one vaccine. The UK is the same. Even Canada, who started very slow, they’re up to 50 per cent with one-shot now. Those are the countries that are going to leap ahead of us. We don’t really start getting into it.”
Turner said while there’s currently no international standard for a ‘vaccination passport’, it’s just a matter of time; but regardless of how it’s monitored, one thing is certain if people want to travel internationally again.
“You’re going to have to be vaccinated,” he said.
The trans-Tasman bubble was a step in the right direction to getting bookings moving again for FCTG Mr Turner said, but it still represented a small part of the business.
The reciprocal Cook Island bubble out of New Zealand and other smaller routes opening up was also psychologically important, as it signalled to people that travel was once again a viable option, he added and was optimistic major routes would reopen within months.
“I think we’ll probably see the UK and the US coming fairly shortly too – by short, I mean three, six and eight months – because they’ve got the vaccinations.”
He said while some people remained risk-averse to international travel, others were less so and that vaccination should be key to any decisions people made.
“We just have to get used to living with this virus it’s going to be around for a long time. We’re really lucky the vaccinations work really well. We’re just going to have to accept in Australia and New Zealand that we’re going to have to live with the virus. It’s going to be endemic; if you don’t want to catch COVID-19, you’re going to have to be vaccinated.”
He predicted that The Flight Centre Travel Group (FCTG) would be back to pre-COVID-19 levels by June 2024 and that the re-opening of major international routes would lead to progress in that direction.
“We have about $1.7 billion in cash … the revenue is increasing every month. It was very low last July, for example, and now it’s up to about 20 per cent of pre-COVID revenue, but we’ve got our costs down to about 30 per cent of pre-COVID levels, so it’s certainly affected us.
“With 23 countries, we went from about $24 billion in sales to about $3 billion this year. From about 21,000 staff to about 7000, we’ve really downsized a lot. But we’re quite resilient, and we’ve got plenty of time to come back.”
Ms Hrdlicka’s comments had led to calls on social media for a boycott of Virgin Australia. Though equally, there was also plenty of other supportive sentiments to say that her comments had been taken out of context by the mainstream media.
The Virgin Australia Chief has since released further clarification around her comments, saying, “I very much understand that my words taken in isolation may have offended people,”
“If had time again I would use different words to make the same point.
“We are a domestic airline that is absolutely committed to keeping the community safe.” Ms Hrdlicka said.
