Flight Centre Has Profits in Sight, Thanks to Higher Airline Fares

Australia’s Flight Centre Travel Group has finally turned a corner, and on Monday updated its 2022 fiscal year market guidance after seeing a “solid rebound” in travel demand.

The Australian based travel giant now predicts it will report a “healthy” fourth-quarter profit, for the three months up to June 30, 2022, on an underlying earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (or EBITDA) basis.

It also aims to break even in its second half, or the six months up to June 30, 2022.

The update comes ahead of its full-year results being published on August 25.

The group took drastic steps early on during the pandemic, closing some 800 retail stores in April 2020. Some 40 percent of those closures involved agencies based in Australia.

“The scale of our recovery exceeded our initial expectations and meant that we should now exceed our preliminary full-year 2022 result target, with early trading results pointing to a breakeven second-half result and a healthy fourth quarter profit,” said managing director Graham Turner in a statement on Monday.

However, it said it expects to report a full-year loss of between $125 million and $132 million for the 12 months to June 30, 2022.

Overall, this would represents an 11.9 percent improvement on its initial 2022 market guidance

In 2021, it made a loss of $234 million.

Total transaction value for the year topped nearly $7 billion, more than two-and-a-half times seen in 2021, the company added, fueled by an uplift in demand and higher than normal ticket prices linked to a lack of airline capacity, particularly on international routes.