Graham Turner talks with the sort of honesty that can send a shiver down a PR person’s spine. The Flight Centre Travel Group Co-Founder and CEO, affectionately called Skroo, is renowned for his off-the-cuff remarks, an openness that can sometimes land him in warm, if not hot, water. Take his opinions on COVID measures, which were well-documented during the pandemic.
But more than 50 years after building a travel empire – firstly with Topdeck Travel and then Flight Centre – based around this transparent, no-nonsense approach, are we about to see a different Skroo?
“I think I’ve become more diplomatic as time goes on,” Skroo tells Karryon in a one-on-one interview in Sydney. Before I’ve even considered passing judgment, he adds that “some people disagree with that”.
“You probably say some things… maybe that [you regret],” Turner remarks.
“But you do get experience… making sure you don’t, particularly if you’ve had a few wines… you don’t text or email or say things that you later regret.
“But I think it’s fair enough to be reasonably outspoken. People need to know what you’re thinking if you have a serious opinion.”
This unscripted approach hasn’t just garnered Skroo respect within the FCTG family (and among many of those looking in); it’s also helped foster a propensity for risk-taking. Needless to say, that’s paid off. Had Turner not rolled the dice on Topdeck – born from a simple idea to travel Europe cheaply – his travel career may never have started. Then again, with his entrepreneurial streak, he probably would’ve built something else. Maybe a vineyard. He’s always liked a good red, and there’s agriculture in the blood (Skroo’s parents were orchardists).
“I’ve always tended to be a bit of an empire builder,” when asked about the origins of FCTG.
“Having two or three buses would never have been enough – and then the same with Flight Centre.”
“I don’t like selling stuff. I like growing stuff.”
That ambition – one that’s taken FCTG to $24.5 billion in total transaction value (TTV) in FY25 – doesn’t take away from the initial spirit of the business.
“When we started Topdeck, we were just there to have some fun, initially,” Skroo says.
“I remember I flew back from Kathmandu after the first overland in early ’76… by then we probably had 10 buses running around Europe, North Africa. And our accountant, a school friend of mine, was doing our books in London, and he said, ‘You know, I think you’ve got a business here’. I looked at him and thought, ‘What do you mean? We’re just doing this for the fun’.”
Birth of the (cool) culture
That mindset has also given Turner licence to be irreverent, rebellious and unafraid to back himself – and that’s been the backbone of Flight Centre’s culture since its birth in the early 80s.
“We’ve had our core values for quite a long time, and our purpose, to open up the world, but it’s obviously got to run a lot deeper than that,” he explains.
“As an organisation… our core values are egalitarian, ownership and irreverence, and we do the irreverence pretty well.”
“Things like COVID changed how we can handle ownership, and obviously, when we came up with the egalitarian thing, we were pretty much all the same age [he adds later, ‘none of us had any money’]… but that’s all changed a bit now. So keeping egalitarianism alive is not that easy, but I don’t think we do a bad job.”
It’s also done a pretty good job at navigating the ups and downs – and there have been many of those.
“When you look at the 70s, in my 20s, running old double-decker buses around the world, Europe, North Africa, through to India, Kathmandu. That was tough, reasonably stressful. So anything that’s happened since then hasn’t been an issue,” he jokes.
More seriously, he says Flight Centre has been “a pretty resilient company”.
“We’ve had things like the first Gulf War in the early 90s, 9/11, the GFC. But none of them were anything compared to COVID. And because we had such an experienced team during COVID… I wasn’t very happy about our politicians and our medical fraternity, but we got through that reasonably well. Although certainly in the early, darkest days, we had to do some incredibly painful actions.”
And when you have serious, potentially life-changing, decisions to make, you need ownership.
“I might have my opinions, but generally, people have ownership [at Flight Centre], particularly at a senior leader level.”
But Graham adds that Flight Centre also needs “the right people running it at the grassroots”. That’s understandable when you’re spread across 26 countries.
Five-year plan?
Even with the right people around, don’t expect Skroo to ride off into the sunset just yet.
“That’s a question that my board asks me a bit,” he says, when I enquire about his retirement plans.
“In the end, it’ll be up to me or the board. It’ll generally be a health thing. I’ve basically said to them that I think I’ve got another five years, depending on health and as a minimum… who knows what’s going to happen when you’re 76?”
Maybe then he’ll also have more time to travel. Though he says he’s not “obsessed” with travelling, he still likes “going back to places that you know and enjoy”. One of those places is London, a city with which he has a long relationship, through business and family.
Another is Paros, a Greek island Skroo and his wife have been visiting “over the last probably 40 years, or even more”.
“It’s just an island, but you get used to it, you know it, and we go back every couple of years, for a week.”
A recently ticked destination, perhaps surprisingly given its popularity, is Japan. But of course, Skroo did it in style.
“My wife was keen to see Japan. We’d never been to Japan, so she convinced a couple of our friends to come. We went on a cruise… a Ponant cruise around Southern Japan, and that was interesting,” he says.
When he’s not working or travelling, Skroo will be at home, probably with a glass of red not too far away, and perhaps listening to an admittedly wide range of music (he particularly likes musicals and opera).
One thing he isn’t really into, however, is movies. When asked who would play him in a film about his life, Skroo is, for once, somewhat stumped.
“Some people have made some smart suggestions on that. I’m not a big movie buff, so I hardly know any well-known actors. I don’t know. I can’t even give you a name.”
And that’s a very Graham Turner answer. No vanity, no theatrics, just a blunt admission that the story, not the spotlight, has always mattered more. And there will no doubt be many more chapters to come for Flight Centre.
