The Flight Centre Travel Group has announced that long-serving senior leader Melissa Elf will take the reins as managing director of all the corporate divisions (FCM, Corporate Traveller, Flight Centre Business Travel, Stage and Screen) across both Australia and New Zealand.
Having been in the travel industry for more than 25 years, Melissa has spent the past 16 years within the corporate business holding various senior leadership roles across account management, sales, and operations and will also retain her current role as leader of the FCM brand within Australia.
“To be able to have the opportunity to lead the corporate brands across Australia and New Zealand is amazing for me – I’m incredibly grateful to be taking on this role,” Melissa says.
“The structure change isn’t too dissimilar to how we’ve been operating throughout the COVID-19 pandemic – it’s more formalising things so we can really grow, and grow fast, moving forward.
“What we really want to focus on is bringing together a leadership team across the two countries that will create a genuine sense of belonging for our people and we want to ensure there are some great brightness of future opportunities for our employees as we emerge from COVID.
“Importantly, we want to solve customer problems. A priority for us is to always deliver the highest possible service level and that will be a key pillar as we look to win more business – along with the amazing technology offerings we have and the incredible experience we have as thought leaders.”
Melissa says Flight Centre Corporate was the largest travel management company across Australia and New Zealand when you looked at all the brands as a collective.
“We want to maintain and grow that position. Business is coming back so quickly and we’re already back at high-80’s of pre-COVID volumes across the ANZ region.
“We’ve won a lot of business over the past couple of years, which is a huge credit to our wider teams, but we’ve also retained 98 per cent of our customers so we’re really focused on growing out of this.”
Keeley Alton remains in her role as general manager, corporate brands for New Zealand and will be working closely with Melissa, leveraging the trans-Tasman relationship, benefiting both the FCTG corporate team and their customers.
CEO Corporate Travel Chris Galanty says Melissa was the perfect candidate to navigate Flight Centre Corporate through the post-pandemic world and beyond.
“We’re absolutely delighted to welcome Mel into the role. Australia and New Zealand together are such important parts of our business – not just for our heritage but for our future as well. It’s fantastic to have someone with such a wealth of experience taking the reins,” he says.
“We continue to deal with the COVID recovery but there are some really exciting things happening in the corporate sphere, so the outlook is incredibly bright as we move forward together as one.”
