IT was Winston Churchill who famously said, “I am an optimist. It does not seem too much use being anything else.” And through this pandemic, most of us who are still in travel have chosen to be optimistic. What’s the alternative?
But there are days when even the strongest, most resilient leaders falter. As the pandemic wears on and travel remains super depressed in Asia Pacific, it’s been harder and harder to keep that chin up.
“Trying to be the head cheerleader, it’s a tough gig” or “just had to raise new round of funds to stay afloat till early next year” are some of the personal messages I have received from friends who run companies, big or small, over the past couple of weeks.
One said, “it’s exhausting to be optimistic” while another said, “we’re beginning to even be cynical about our own optimism”.
Yet, for those whose businesses depend on cross-border regional travel, optimism is the about the only fuel we in Asia Pacific have had to run on and it was Helen Keller who said, “Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.”
The good news is, we who work in travel are inherently optimistic. It’s almost a prerequisite to be an optimist to hold a job in travel, whether in good, bad or indifferent times – indeed, only optimists need apply.
So it wasn’t that surprising that at the hybrid WiT Travel Roadshow yesterday evening at Marina Bay Sands, when we asked our audience if they were feeling more optimistic now than they did six months ago, almost 70% said yes, saying they were seeing recovery in some markets. About 28% said “same-same”, that things are still too uncertain to say.
And when you consider what a leader such as Graham ‘Skroo’ Turner, CEO of Flight Centre Limited, has gone through to keep his global group afloat at such times, you have got to take your hat off to the survivors of this biggest crisis to hit travel – those who are still standing and fighting to stay alive till whenever travel recovery happens, wherever you are.
‘Skroo’ is someone who’s seen it all. His back story is well documented – in 1973 he and two mates bought a couple of double-decker buses in England and began Top Deck Travel. He returned to Australia in 1981 and opened the first Flight Centre leisure travel shop in Sydney the year after, and floated the company in 1995. Today, the group is present in 23 countries.
Asked if there had been another time that came close to what he’d experienced with this crisis, he recalled a time in London when he and his mates ran out of cash and were in debt, and they took their creditors out for a curry meal and thankfully, that worked and they got over that hump.
Of course, today, he’d have to buy several gazillion gallons of curry but it was that experience that taught him that cash is everything, especially when it comes to a crisis of this magnitude.
When I reminded him that his company had to issue $1.4 billion in refunds, he pooh-poohed that and said, “That’s just in Australia.” Globally, the number came up to almost $2.4 billion.
Speaking from his last day in a Sydney quarantine hotel, back from a trip to the UK, ‘Skroo’ looked remarkably relaxed for someone you know must be so chafing at the reins. This is a man who’s a keen bike rider and marathon runner, so you can imagine 14 days in a hotel room can’t be fun.
This is also a man who, last September said, “our country is going to be ruined” by “chief medical officers who are not interested in the economy”. Imagine how he feels nearly a year on when things, in fact, have gotten worse in his home country with lockdowns and warring states at each other’s throats.
But yesterday, his share price was up almost five percent despite the company posting a $507 million full-year loss for 2020. The numbers weren’t pretty but clearly there’s an underlying optimism (that word again) about travel returning.
Underlying losses were heaviest in the leisure travel division, at $366 million. TTV declined 74.2% to $3,945 million, while revenues plunged 79.1% to $396m. Leisure travel remains at 16% of normal levels while corporate travel made a bit of a comeback to account for 55% of TTV.
And clearly a lesson from his “mistake” during those London days – the company reported it had about $941 million in liquidity available as of June, enough funds potentially to last it “well into” calendar year 2023.
Turner remains optimistic – yes, that word again – and in fact, when I asked him when I could visit Australia again, he said, “December.”
In the Australian Financial Review yesterday, he was quoted as well, saying, “Australia and New Zealand will inevitably open sooner or later, certainly well before Christmas we believe.”
Yet you can tell this period has been painful, especially when it comes to making people cuts. Skroo is someone who’s always championed people in his career, saying things like, “If you have the right people, that’s twice as important as having the right location” or “Our company is our people”.
Flight Centre’s staff force has gone from 21,000 to 8,000, he said yesterday, and that was the most painful thing he’s had to do. It’s starting to bring back people and he acknowledged the challenge of bringing back people as travel recovers – that we may not be able to do it fast enough.
He confesses to an uneasy personal relationship with technology and laughingly recalled a quote he made in the 90s when he brushed off the Internet but today Flight Centre is at the forefront of technological transformation, an area he says he leaves to the experts.
What he’s passionate about is the environment – he is also a qualified vet, by the way – and his family has committed more than $18.5 million to a south-east Queensland conservation project. He believes that even though we are in travel, and it is in our interests that people travel, we should accept that maybe some “travel” can be done on Zoom. “That is the balance we have to strike.”
And oh, he does not want to go to space – “I will leave that to the Bransons of this world”.
Another quote he famously said was, “Whatever you do, don’t write one of those sickly corporate books that glorify the company. We need to have all our …. mistakes in there, that’s what really shaped us”, so I simply had to ask “if you were to write a book, what would it be called?”.
His answer, ‘Skroo the rules’.
Yes, optimism keeps us moving forward each step-by-calibrated-step but hey, a little rebellion and fighting spirit definitely go a long way, as it has in Skroo’s case. We need more survivors and leaders like him in travel.
Note: The WiT Travel Roadshow Episode 6 was WiT’s first physical event of the year – with 20 onsite delegates – and featured Marina Bay Sands’ new studio with projecting mapping technology. Definitely a reason to be optimistic, right?
• Featured image credit: Shyn Yee-Ho Strangas
