Supporting international growth
Who is Flight Centre Travel Group?
When they found Flight Centre Travel Group in 1982, Graham “Skroo” Turner, Bill James, and Geoff Harris only had a single store. Since then, the three Aussies have worked to turn the group into an industry giant, becoming a $20 billion travel business spread over 23 countries and more than 19,000 staff all over the globe. One of Australia’s most-loved brands, FCTG is also the largest travel retailer in the Southern Hemisphere.
Flight Centre’s main driver is their absolute passion for travel and their success is the result of the hard work of many people for several years – many of which are still strongly involved in the company.
The group relies on an organizational structure built around the concepts of Family, Village and Tribe. This translates into a lean and flat organization where people can discuss, interact and exchange ideas across departments and hierarchy. This environment supports FCTG’s main mission: being one of the world’s best and biggest small business operators.
The challenge
Such global growth as Flight Centre has gone through is an amazing business success, but it is also a great responsibility. Scaling the business became problematic as the span of action kept widening. At the same time, spreading all over the globe also meant that many employees of Flight Centre were located far from each other, and access to information was an issue. It became expensive to scale the system to support the growth of the business and keep track of all crucial data.
With their old system, the group struggled to make data-driven decisions, mainly because of the outdated analytical tools that lacked user-friendliness, predictive features, and overall power.
The solution
FCTG decided to go with our cloud solution for their American and Canadian markets as a start. The plan is to expand to all their locations in the upcoming years.
By choosing a solution hosted on the Microsoft Cloud, Flight Centre can benefit from a 100% scalable solution. With their cloud-based system, they can easily and quickly scale up and down depending on their current workload in order to keep the costs low and efficient.
Another fundamental point was to have a modern interface that would be easier to use for their employees. TravelOperations Enterprise is known for its user-friendly and role-based interface, allowing employees to access everything they need within a few clicks – conveniently and efficiently.
Lastly, Flight Centre saw the potential of having embedded powerful reporting tools that would change their employees’ work routine for the better. With the new dashboards, employees could have a real-time overview of the company and the customers, together with access to predictions and insights powered by artificial intelligence.
“[It] is simply one financial system that allows our people to work in a more automated, integrated and transparent way than they’ve ever done before.”
Adam Campbell, Global CFO, Flight Centre Travel Group
The impact
Despite the recent implementation, Flight Centre Travel Group can already see many of the benefits that will keep growing over time. Specifically, their end-of-the-month process has declined from taking 3 to 4 days to having actuals at the end of day 1. Also, the company managed to cut the reporting time. What used to take them 4 to 5 days can now be in 1 day of using our solution.
“I think Dynamics has really given us the additional time to look after our customers. I think it has enhanced our ability to spend a little bit more time with each customer, guaranteeing a better customer experience.”
Billy McDonough, President, FCM Travel Solutions
FCTG employees anticipate being able to handle 30% more business thanks to the implementation of Microsoft Dynamics and TravelOperations Enterprise and are planning on gradually rolling out the solution to all of their markets.*
“It does streamline the process, it’s an efficient method of getting information to us, we also are able to fix back-office reporting, which also helps our clients too. So it really is a win for us as far as efficiency.”
Rick Sciuto, Team Laver, FCM Travel Solutions
Interested?
