Flight Centre embarks on global expansion of FCM Meetings & Events amid strong demand

Australia’s largest travel group will beef up its presence in Europe and Asia with the global expansion of its FCM Meetings & Events brand to take a greater slice of the $1.36 trillion conference sector.

Flight Centre will expand its meetings and events division globally as the travel group looks to cash in on the strong appetite for conferences and corporate events in the post-pandemic world.

The global launch of its FCM Meetings & Events division marks another step in the group’s return to normal following the end of Covid-19 restrictions, having shut down its previous incarnation at the start of the 2020.

The expansion will bring together staff located across Australia, New Zealand, India and North America under one banner and will also see it beef-up presence in the UK, Europe and Asia.

The newly global brand will be overseen by freshly minted global general manger Simone Seiler, who said Flight Centre planned to disrupt the meetings and event sector with new offerings and to grow its market share across various markets.

“We’ve just seen the exponential growth and demand for meetings and events, products and professional services from our clients across the globe, whether that’s enterprise or multinational clients,” Ms Seiler told The Australian. “The business has identified it as an opportunity to invest, to grow and to target more share of spend in the sector and market share overall.”

Ms Seiler said that the Meetings, Incentives, Conferences, and Exhibitions market was ripe for disruption with Flight Centre believing it was well-placed to capitalise with personalised event experiences.

The global MICE market was valued at $US876.42bn ($1.36 trillion) in 2022 and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 6.6 per cent from 2022 to 2030 to reach $US1563.3bn by 2030, a research paper by Grand View Research reports.

The global push will see FCM Meetings & Events introduce a raft of new technology offerings to allow clients to be more effective in their conference organisation and to allow staff to offer more personalised services, including data-driven insights.

Simone Seiler will become the new global general manager of Flight Centre's FCM Meetings & Events division

FCM Meetings & Events already had a strong presence in India, North America, Mexico and Australia and New Zealand with headcounts per country sitting anywhere from 90 to 120 people per region. The broader push will also see it expand teams in the UK, Europe and Asia.

“We want to expand into new regions and also to leverage our partner networks that exist at the moment in all sorts of pockets of the world,” Ms Seiler said.

“We are really investing in the expansion of the UK European network as our number one priority shortly, closely followed by Asia and giving that opportunity for not only our clients to have a broader solution in terms of meetings and events services that we offer.”

Internal data from Flight Centre showed that education, sport and retail trade were the most likely to travel for meetings or events in Australia between January 1 and August 31 of this year. The three city pairs for flights to those events were Melbourne to Sydney, Adelaide to Melbourne and Brisbane to Melbourne.

Ms Seiler said that the meetings and events space was vastly different to before the pandemic, with lead times much shorter and in budgets for conferences higher. The weaker Australian dollar and desire to see the world had made Australia a more attractive destination for global businesses to stage conferences, retreats and other incentive programs.

“We know through our industry peers and bodies that they are also seeing an increase of traffic and interesting coming to Australia, which is very appealing based on the exchange rate at the moment,” she said.