June 24, 2026 — 5:00amWelcome to CityChats, where Brisbane Times meets our city’s most interesting characters on our most iconic form of transport. This week, Flight Centre founder Graham “Skroo” Turner tells us how AI will affect the travel business, the unexpected locations travellers favour at present, and why his family is so passionate about the cycling market.We meet Turner at the South Bank ferry terminal, near the Flight Centre head office. He’s heading into the CBD for a meeting, so our hopes of getting access to the office’s infamous slide after our interview are dashed.Flight Centre founder Graham “Skroo” Turner.Fairfax MediaYou were initially studying to be a vet, then pivoted to business with Topdeck Travel. Your son Matt started 99 Bikes and your daughter Joanna co-founded LNDR. What’s in your DNA that makes for good businesspeople?When you grow up in a family-run apple orchard, you’re part of the business from the start. And not just working on it, but being a bit involved in the decisions they’re making and the business that’s going on, whether it’s good or bad.I worked as a vet for a couple of years, and my son was a physio for a couple of years. He said one of the practices that he worked in taught him a lot about business, particularly about what not to do. So he got a lot of lessons out of that.I think it was a little bit the same working as a vet. You see some of the shortcomings and no business is perfect, of course.What is it about the cycling market that your family is so passionate about?Bikes have been resilient over the years and one thing I do predict is that young kids, quite a few of them, ride legal e-bikes now. I think parents are smart enough not to let them ride the illegal ones.I think that’ll become a bigger and bigger thing. Ten years ago, legal e-bikes were perhaps 10 per cent of the sales. Now they’re more like 40 per cent. It’s going to be a big thing.We do quite a few bike tours in Asia and Europe through our Grasshopper brand and legal e-bikes are great for touring. You have a dozen people on an organised group and obviously some of them are fitter and better riders than others. The e-bike evens everyone up, so everyone can keep up.Do you think we need a bigger bike culture in Brisbane?If you go to a place like France, they’ve got a history of the Tour de France. Drivers in Europe, particularly France and Italy, it’s really obvious they’re very wary of bikers and cyclists.When I first went to the UK, you took your life in your hands riding your bike around London. Australia was like that, but I think it’s improving here. I think it’ll be much safer for people to ride on roads, but it still needs the specific bike paths and that to be a major part of it. And you see a place like London, it’s transformed over the last 20 or 30 years from that point of view.Where are people in Brisbane travelling currently?The Middle East war obviously hasn’t really helped travel, particularly to Europe, because the Middle Eastern carriers – Qatar, Etihad and Emirates – they account for about 35 per cent of our traffic normally through to Europe. And, obviously, they had to stop flying for a while.They’re back flying now, but people are still a bit wary. It looks like the war might be over, but it’s been looking like that for the last few weeks. And that will come back.But to replace that, a lot more Brisbane people are flying to places like Bali, Fiji in particular, Vietnam, Japan. Shorter-haul destinations, or they’re flying through China to Europe or through the States.So it’s altered the travel destinations of people a bit, but, generally, it hasn’t had too big an effect yet. It’s certainly had an effect. It takes the cream off certainly a business like ours when you lose quite a bit of that European travel and people just being a bit wary and a bit scared of travelling through the Middle East.Are there any unexpected places that people are travelling?Some of these central Asian countries are becoming more popular. Not with your general run-of-the-mill tourist but with the more adventurous traveller.The other place that’s becoming quite popular again is China. Spectacular country with a mixed reputation for the average tourist, but you know once people get there they seem to really enjoy it. It’s becoming very popular again, as well as some other parts of Asia – Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia.Do you see AI as your next hurdle?Well, it’s both an opportunity and a threat. It depends where you are. You know, we have our tour operations with Back-Roads Touring and Topdeck Travel. Obviously, AI can’t replace that, they’re experiences.Some of our other travel companies or travel businesses that are more intermediaries, it’ll be an opportunity to get a lot more efficiency out of it to provide a better service to customers, a quicker, more accurate one.But generally, most people will want that personal touch, having a person behind their travel, particularly if they’re complex or expensive or a more luxury, complex sort of travel.We think AI will enhance that experience but won’t replace it. All those people who like doing their own things, they have simple point-to-point itineraries, they’ll be using AI more and more and we’ll be part of that too.Would that mean that you would lose jobs in that part of the company?Yes, for sure. I mean, there are certain, probably relatively low-skill jobs that are going to be replaced by AI. There’s no question. But certainly from our point of view, people who have good abilities will find other areas to use their skill sets, probably more productively than doing repetitive, easy-to-replace tasks.At the time of publishing, Flight Centre subsidiary Travel Money was advertising for a customer and consultant service manager role to “own the evolution of email and chat support toward AI-assisted resolution”.Do you see investing in the social experiences as the future? Are they less likely to be replaced by AI?Definitely. And you look at some of the tour operators that are quite popular in Australia, G Adventures and Intrepid Travel, they’re very popular and they’re slightly more independent touring.Topdeck is somewhat in between that and a pure touring company. In Asia and Europe we see a lot of opportunity for that, particularly people who want to travel with other people from a social aspect but also are not that confident about travelling by themselves – particularly in countries where English isn’t the first language, which is a lot of Asia and a lot of Europe.We think there’s a lot of opportunity there, and we will be investing in that over the next few years.Turner later tells us about his first-ever trip overseas, with his friends to New Zealand. They drove around in a beat-up car that someone crashed into. The insurance company decided it would cost more to fix than it was worth, so bought it from the group instead. From a travel perspective, do you have any views on the locations that we’re looking at for Brisbane 2032? Obviously, there’s been controversy around the rowing. Do you think people would actually travel up north or do you think it’s better to keep things around Brisbane?This is a tough question. I suspect that Rockhampton is not a great site for the rowing. Rowing needs to be fair, and it needs the condition to be very similar whether you’re in lane 1 or lane 8. There’s a bit of politics that the regional people obviously want some of the events there. I think, generally, Brisbane will be the centre of it and if events can be accessible from Brisbane, that will be a better outcome for the sport involved.If you take rowing, they row on Lake Wivenhoe, I think, mainly, and that’s maybe an hour’s drive. I think Moreton Bay has fantastic facilities and Stradbroke Island, for example, is a great island close to the city. The ferries over there and over to Moreton Island, there’s just so much to see so close to Brisbane. It’ll be a fantastic place for the Games and Brisbane won’t be the same afterwards, whether you like it or not.Start the day with a summary of the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. 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