Flight Centre Founder and FCTG CEO, Graham “Skroo” Turner has weathered the GFC, avian flu and COVID in the past 20 years. Based on learnings from previous challenges impacting global travel, he says it’s time for the industry to work together.
Speaking at the 2026 LTC Luxury Product Showcase in Brisbane, FCTG CEO Turner said the Middle East conflict is the latest challenge for the travel industry as airport and border closures, commercial flight and cruise cancellations, and rising oil costs and airfares fuel global disruption.
While most travel segments have yet to see significant impacts from the US-Israel-Iran war, he said this is the time for the industry to band together.
State of play in the Middle East
The FCTG CEO said recent advice from major airlines, such as Qantas and Emirates, indicated that aviation leaders expect the Middle East crisis to last longer than they had hoped, while on the flipside, the situation has highlighted the important role of travel advisors.
“One of the things I’ve been asked is where the travel industry will be in five years’ time? And right at the moment, we’ve got some challenges in the Middle East,” he said.
“It’s not looking that great. Cruising, in particular, is struggling a bit at the moment in some of the brands in the company.
“The Middle East is important, particularly out of Australia. Luckily, we’ve got some significant and reasonable alternatives,” he said about other air options between Australia and Europe via Asia.
Unity in the travel community
“I think one of the really interesting things, certainly from a Flight Centre Travel Group point of view, is that we’ve become much more involved in the travel industry over the last 10 years, initially with AFTA and then with the new association called ATIA,” the FCTG CEO said.
“As an industry, we at last realise that working together, we can achieve a lot more.”
Turner mentioned Australian Travel Industry Association (ATIA) CEO Dean Long, who has been active in the media to counter the panic and concern experienced by travellers and the general public.
“Just in the last few weeks, with CATO, ATIA and particularly Dean Long being quite involved in representing the industry, at least we know the industry is represented across the board and that we have a reasonably united voice on this,” Turner said.
“There is no doubt that in the next few months or hopefully the next few days we are going to see quite a bit of change.”
Adapt to change and do things differently
Drawing on his personal experience in his timely address, Turner underlined the importance of leadership and change campaigns to address these challenges in the travel industry.
“Change is a campaign, not a decision,” the FCTG CEO told the LTC advisors. “Companies like ours and yours must be able to adapt to change. Leadership, then, is about learning how to cope with rapid change.”
“As leaders, big goals can seem overwhelming. The magnitude of problems that we’ve got at the moment, the difficulty of the solutions, having no control over some of these solutions, the length of the time horizon, and the number of action items it can take make change feel so complex that we can feel paralysed and nothing happens.
“We need to be willing to evolve into an entirely different way of doing things. We need to be willing to form alliances with former adversaries and other brands and people in the travel industry, with our supply chain, with our customers, but never give up on our core values and what our brand stands for.
“The signature of truly great brands and businesses is not the absence of difficulty, it’s the ability to come back from setbacks, even cataclysmic catastrophe, stronger than before. And we, I think, in the travel industry, we’ve had a few examples of that,” he said.
Read what FCTG’s Global CEO, Leisure Travel, James Kavanagh, also had to say on the topic here.
