Vice Chair, Graham Turner
Managing Director, Flight Centre Limited.
Graham “Skroo” Turner was raised on an apple orchard near the Queensland town of Stanthorpe and later trained as a veterinarian at the University of Queensland.
After graduating from university, he worked as a vet in western Victoria before moving to London in the early 1970s. In London, Skroo and friend Geoff “Spy” Lomas, both of whom were working as vets, took their first steps into the travel industry in 1973 when they invested the equivalent of $AU1300 in an ageing bus and started operating budget double-decker bus trips around Europe, North Africa and Asia
After an eventful start, that company, Top Deck Travel, grew quickly and its success cemented Skroo's future in the travel industry. Top Deck Travel had grown into a thriving business with some 80 buses by the early 1980s when Skroo returned to Australia and launched the Flight Centre leisure travel business.
His initial involvement with Top Deck ended in the mid-1980s when he and his colleagues sold the business to management and devoted their full attention to Flight Centre, which had less than 30 shops at that time.
As the long-serving chief executive officer and managing director of the public company that grew from the small band of Flight Centre shops, Skroo has since presided over a golden era of growth and prosperity for the Flight Centre Travel Group (FLT)
Skroo and his wife, Judith, have a strong commitment to conservation and the environment, both personally and through the Turner Family Foundation, which oversees the flagship research facility The Hidden Vale Wildlife Centre
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