Flight Centre CEO Graham Turner shows no sings of slowing down with marathons and plans for global empire

In the fast-paced, ever-evolving world of travel, Graham “Skroo” Turner knows he must stay on the front foot.

Because achieving success is one thing, sustaining it is another.

Lucky then that after more than 50 years in the business, the 76-year-old co-founder and CEO of Flight Centre Travel Group remains one step ahead and more than happy to tie up his running shoes — as evidenced by recently completing his eighth London marathon.

The long-distance-running Queenslander set off with his kids and about 20 Flight Centre employees and their family members on his recent trot around Britain’s capital.

His son Matt ran an impressive three hours and 16 minutes, slightly ahead of Turner’s son-in-law at three hours 18 minutes. Skroo’s own goal was simpler — to finish.

“It’s more a matter of survival at my age,” says Turner, who crossed the line in just over seven hours.

“One of the things you find out when you get to 76 is when you train you don’t improve much, but when you train when you’re young you can improve. I think I’ve done the London Marathon eight times. The first time was 1982 and my best time was three and a half hours in 1991.”

Aside from running, Turner still enjoys getting out on his mountain bike and continues to play touch rugby every week.

A healthy body is as essential as an active mind, he believes, and he remains nimble on both fronts, talking fluently about the future of travel in a world reshaped by artificial intelligence.

Having built Flight Centre Travel Group into a globally influential travel business over the course of five decades, Turner is well used to confronting challenges.

The 1991 Gulf War, September 11 terror attacks in 2001, 2008’s global financial crisis and the current fuel price surge caused by the Iran conflict have all threatened his business. The biggest hurdle, he says, was the global pandemic but even in that, Turner is pragmatic.

“COVID was by far the worst,” he says. “But it kind of showed business isn’t life and death. So, I’d say take the risks and have a go at being successful.”

Turner has long been a lover of travel, something that can perhaps be attributed to his desire to escape his rural roots.

He grew up on an apple orchard in south Queensland, off a dusty country road that connects Stanthorpe and Texas.

“Really it was pretty boring,” he says. “I stuck was in the middle of nowhere for the first 15 years of my life.”

He attended a one-teacher school where he was enlisted to make up the numbers on the netball team.

As a schoolboy he acquired the nickname Skroo, due to the popularity of the Turner brand of screwdrivers, and it has stuck for six decades. Only his mother, who passed away 15 years ago, insisted on still calling him Graham.

A bright kid, Skroo saw education as his way out of his sleepy home town, enrolling in University of Queensland where he studied to be a vet and spent a lot of time on the rugby pitch.

“There was excitement to be going to university,” he says. “I did medical science and with some friends we decided once we saved a bit of money, we’d go to the Munich Olympics (in 1972).”

After the Olympics, Turner stayed on in Europe travelling around in a kombi van. He was working as a vet in the north England county of Yorkshire when he had a light bulb moment after passing an airfield filled with double-decker buses for sale.

He’d seen a couple of kitted-out buses travelling around Europe and thought it was a good business idea, marking his first foray into the travel industry.

“I convinced a couple of mates (Geoff “Spy” Lomas and Bill James) to start running tours,” Turner says.

Founded in 1973, the business became known as Top Deck Travel (later Topdeck Travel or simply Topdeck) and allowed Turner and his friends to take off on a double-decker bus with the maiden voyage cruising through France, Portugal and Morocco.

They paid £1200 for a second-hand bus and charged each of the 17 passengers £100 each.

Before long the tours were spreading throughout Europe and beyond.

“We had a lot of fun and we even made a little bit of money,” Turner says. “Not a lot, but it became a business.”

Recently revamped into what is informally known as Topdeck 3.0 with a focus on smaller groups and more authentic experiences, Topdeck remains the foundation business of Flight Centre Travel Group.

Turner has plenty of colourful stories from the era, enough to fill a book in fact, which James decided to do in the memoir Top Deck Daze.

At the time travel was far less controlled by travel restrictions and bureaucracy and the Top Deck team had their fair share of memorable adventures, which included having to bail clients out of jail, putting pedal to the metal to get an oversized bus onto a Spanish ferry, and even setting up a church and having Skroo pose as a Christian minister to enable passage through Iran.

“You could do just about anything and not just get away with it, you didn’t even think about it. You just had to do what you had to do,” Turner says of that period.

While he was often off having fun on tours, Turner says he was very happy to be based in London throughout the 70s and into the early 80s. He still finds Britain’s historic, financial and cultural capital an inspiring place to be.

“I really enjoy London, it just has that thing for me. Obviously, we’ve just been back to run the marathon and we (Turner and his wife, Jude) lived there a lot of the time,” he says.

When it comes to escape, the travel guru cites a Greek island known for beautiful hilltop towns, beaches and a laid-back family vibe as his potential favourite.

“Paros is one of those islands a little bit off the beaten track and we really love it,” he says. “It’s a place we visited as a couple and with my kids (son Matt and daughter Jo) to a lesser extent.

“I think we’re going there next year in May for my wife’s sister’s 80th birthday. It’s just one of those places we’ve been going to since about 1976, so for about 50 years. It’s got a bit more touristy now, but it’s a great island.”

Turner spread his wings to air travel in 1982 after spotting a gap in the travel market following the government deregulation of discounted air travel.

Then aged 32, the entrepreneur believed he could build a business offering cheaper airfares, mainly between Australia and the UK.

Flight Centre started with stores in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. Over the next 44 years its digital or physical store footprint grew to sprawl across Australia, the UK, USA, Canada, South Africa, Singapore, the Middle East and India, alongside much of Europe and Latin America.

The travel giant listed on the ASX in 1995 and operates in the leisure and corporate travel sectors. Some of its growth has come via acquisitions and some organically as an emerging middle class could afford to travel the world once a year or more.

The recognisable red stores and their uniformed employees have survived the rise of internet bookings and site aggregators offering price comparisons for flights.

Now a new threat from AI travel agents marks another major disruption.

In the future it’s believed that AI agents like Anthropic’s Claude or ChatGPT will be able to search, recommend and book flights, holidays, hotels, sightseeing trips, golf tee times, ski passes and restaurants for holidaymakers.

But Turner is determined to keep abreast of the change.

“There’s no doubt AI is going to disrupt some aspects of travel,” he says. “To what extent is the million-dollar question. If we’re not at the forefront of it we’re going to be left behind. In the mass market we really need to make sure we can personalise the AI for our customers.

“At the moment AI particularly in leisure is about aiding our frontline people so they can get back to customers faster, with better information.”

Turner adds that he believes Flight Centre is leading in AI tools for business travellers. More than half the group’s profits and total transaction volumes came from corporate travellers over the six months to December 31.

Its growth in the corporate travel sector has helped it build total sales from bookings in 28 of the last 30 years.

The long-term operational success has been offset by investors’ worries over the competitive environment and the hit from the coronavirus travel shutdown that left the group having to roughly double its shares on issue in 2020 during an emergency capital raising.

Turner’s stake of 16.95 million shares today is worth about $185 million and his other business interests with wife Jude have branched out across hotels, property and wildlife conservation.

He continues to enjoy navigating the challenges of business and claims retirement holds little appeal because the thought of staying in bed all day bores him.

In April, the still avid cyclist lifted his personal bets on the continued popularity of biking and e-bikes by using his family’s consortium, Turner Collective, to buy 76 per cent of retailer 99 Bikes, founded by his son Matt in 2007.

The deal values parent company Pedal Group, which was founded as a joint venture between the Turner family and Flight Centre, at $61.7m.

“Australians love to exercise,” he said at the time of the deal to invest more into cycling.

His daughter has also hedged her bet on the enduring appeal of exercise, co-founding the activewear label LNDR with two friends in 2015. The cult label has found celebrity fans in the likes of Gigi Hadid, Margot Robbie and Kourtney Kardashian.

Turning 77 this year, Turner says he has no plans to slow down as he approaches 80. He believes exercise is the key to longevity and both his parents lived to 90.

He likes to repeat that business “isn’t life and death”, perhaps inferring that there are more important things than corporate success. Family, staying active and travel are logically top of his list.

The former vet has nothing but admiration for British wildlife conservationist, writer, broadcaster and natural historian Sir David Attenborough, who recently celebrated his 100th birthday in seemingly good health.

“He’s really been amazing and you see someone like him at 100 years old and it changes your attitude to age a bit,” Turner says. “Because my parents both died at 90 and sometimes I think that can be too old. But when you see someone live to 100 like him, you have to admire them, and he’s a great advocate for old age.”

Plenty would suggest a certain marathon-running septuagenarian CEO is also quite inspiring.