The Flight Centre Travel Group, including FCM and Corporate Traveller, secured a record amount of new corporate business in its financial year ending June 2020 but posted significant overall losses.
While the wider group witnessed a dramatic downturn due to the Covid-19 pandemic – AUD$510m underlying loss before tax – the corporate division proved relatively resilient thanks to an abundance of clients in the mining, energy and construction sectors which contined to book essential travel throughout the crisis.
FCM won new business globally with projected annual spend of US$1.3billion – in normal circumstances – which included multinational companies, large national businesses and government organisations. It says the majority was secured between January and June.
Corporate Traveller, which specialises in the SME sector, won new business valued in the region of US$400million annually.
Overall, the two divisions saw a profit before tax of around AUD$65million for the group’s financial year and are “well placed to break even on domestic/regional volumes”.
The whole group had achieved AUD$150million in global profits for the first eight months of its reporting year before decreasing significantly in March.
“We are committed to not just getting through this crisis, but to taking advantage of the post-Covid market,” says Chris Galanty, Global CEO of Flight Centre’s corporate travel business.
“The pandemic has caused a fundamental global dislocation of the business travel industry and we have had to make difficult decisions. However, we didn’t cut back on investing in implementation, sales, account management and solution design. We made that decision from the outset. If Flight Centre’s corporate divisions are going to come out of this successfully, we needed to keep growing.”