Before we hit record, Tom Walley is already in full storyteller mode. We’re swapping notes on our favorite parts of the United States, laughing about the quirks of Vermont and marveling at the Rockies. It’s an easygoing back-and-forth that almost makes you forget you’re chatting with a Global Managing Director responsible for a multimillion-dollar travel business.
But that down-to-earth energy runs through everything Walley does. It’s shaped the culture at Corporate Traveller, the small and medium-size enterprise (SME)-focused arm of Flight Centre Travel Group. It’s why, more than 20 years after joining the business on a whim, he’s still there.
“You can be yourself here. No-one has egos,” Walley tells The CEO Magazine. “We take our business seriously, but not ourselves. And that’s the real thing I love about this place – it just feels like that all the time.”
The accidental executive
Funny enough, Walley never set out to build a career in travel. In fact, he first found himself in accounting at Pricewaterhouse – “before it was PwC,” he jokes.
Bored with spreadsheets and audit reports, he packed a bag and left Australia to see the world. He traveled for three years, chasing adventure across continents before rediscovering his childhood dream of becoming a commercial pilot.
Walley’s mother had passed away shortly before he left, and the inheritance she left behind helped fund his flight training. By 2001, he was lining up for a cadet role with British Airways in London. Then came 9/11.
“British Airways canceled my interview,” he recalls. “They put a pause on hiring.”
Regardless, he was still determined to make things work in London, so he took a job at Flight Centre Travel Group – an Australian brand he knew well.
“I knew if I wanted to get a flying job, I’d have to pay for more training, which I couldn’t afford at the time,” he explains. “So I took a job at Flight Centre thinking I’d do it for a little while until I sorted myself out. I liked the principle of running your own business.”
However, as a travel consultant, he earned just over US$16,000 a year. Six months in, Walley barely made any commission and was ready to quit.
“In London, this was not a lot of money. It was beans on toast,” he says. “Fortunately, my wife worked for an investment bank and could fund me staying at Flight Centre.”
It was his wife, along with a strong mentor, his first manager, who stepped in and convinced him to stay. That decision proved pivotal and once he settled in, he was hooked.
“The culture grabbed me straight away,” Walley reveals. “I became addicted to it. The people were fun and friendly. I could be myself and there were career opportunities, which I felt I needed.”
Rising through the ranks
Walley’s career at Flight Centre accelerated quickly. From running a single shop to managing entire areas of London, including the West End and parts of Essex, he embraced leadership early and learned fast.
In fact, he eventually went on to lead the United Kingdom retail business through the global financial crisis – a brutal period marked by layoffs, shrinking margins and uncertainty.
“That was probably the hardest thing I’ve been through,” he admits.
But in 2011, after a decade in the United Kingdom, things started looking up. Walley returned to his hometown of Perth with his family to lead multiple brands across Western and South Australia and the Northern Territory.
“I was moving back home. We had two kids and our third on the way at that point, and were happy to leave England. We left a small flat and bad weather for a five-bedroom house in the sunshine, and it was amazing,” he says with a smile.
Just a year later, Walley was tapped to lead Flight Centre’s entire leisure business in Australia – overseeing 7,000 staff and 1,100 stores doing around US$4.5 billion in turnover.
“It was the biggest job I’ve ever done,” he acknowledges. “It was challenging and amazing at the same time.”
Working under Founder and CEO Graham Turner and then-COO Melanie Waters-Ryan taught him plenty. Not just about scale either, but also navigating leadership dynamics with authenticity and grit.
In 2019, he was ‘promoted to corporate’, as his boss quipped – the same one who hired him two decades earlier and now heads up Global Corporate Operations. Walley was asked to run Corporate Traveller in Australia. And by late 2021, he was leading it globally.
A culture of ownership
Under Walley’s leadership, Corporate Traveller now operates in six countries with more than 1,500 employees. And while technology and scale have transformed the travel industry, he insists the company’s culture is still its strongest edge. But that doesn’t mean it comes easily.
“Keeping our culture strong across different time zones and borders as we scale is hard,” he admits. “But we’re able to do it by employing the right people who are a culture fit and leading by example.”
At the very foundation of that culture, he says, is ownership.
“We don’t have a complaints department or a ‘press three to speak to a customer service agent’ setup,” he says.
“We expect the person who owns the customer to resolve any issue. If they don’t, they lose the customer – and that’s on them.”
It’s a system that works because, as Walley puts it, Corporate Traveller is full of people who genuinely care.
“We all love travel, and we know what it’s like to be away from your family and a million miles from home,” he says. “That authentic understanding of our customers, about what SMEs want, is what sets us apart.”
For Corporate Traveller, SMEs are its bread and butter. Walley defines the sweet spot as companies spending between US$5,000 to US$105,000 per month on travel.
“There’s no-one as big as us in the world who looks after that type of travel – most are drawn to the large-market accounts,” he explains. “Work like that sounds really cool and sexy and fun, but it’s complex work.”
When bigger isn’t better
Instead, by focusing on SMEs, Walley says the company has found its perfect balance.
“I play in a world of perfectly blended people and tech,” he points out. “And for me, bigger isn’t always better. We win when we stay in the SME space, and we hero our people with technology.”
Walley on Corporate Traveller’s point of difference
Like many companies, Corporate Traveller first used AI to eliminate tedious tasks like finance and back-office operations. But more recently, its focus has shifted to customer-facing innovation.
Rather than replacing travel agents with AI bots, the company is building tools to augment the agent’s role.
“We use AI to make life easier for the agent, so we allow them to shine,” he says. “There’s a phrase we use here: ‘We automate the ordinary so we can shine in the extraordinary,’ and that pretty much sums up our approach to tech.”
That philosophy is now also embedded in Melon, the company’s proprietary platform used in North America and the United Kingdom, which boasts more than 50,000 active users and US$500 million in annual transaction value.
Its AI tool, currently in the works, will triage travel updates and disruptions in real time but, crucially, hands off to a real human when needed.
“And that human will be a fully employed person by Corporate Traveller – not a random person in a call center,” he emphasizes.
Travel that works
The goal isn’t to dazzle with tech, though; it’s to make travel frictionless for customers.
“As a business traveler myself, all I want is for it to work,” Walley says. “If something goes pear-shaped, I like the ability to have someone solve it. That’s when I call Emma, my agent back here in Australia, and she deals with it for me.”
This human touch is a key part of Corporate Traveller’s offering. While much has changed over the years, the one thing that’s remained constant is that customers still want human support when they travel.
“People who travel long-haul for work still want someone to help them out, whether it’s during the booking process or post-booking if something goes wrong,” he points out.
“There’s more disruption these days. Things tend to go wrong a lot more – not just in airlines, although they are certainly more cautious now, but on a global scale, like the conflicts in the Middle East, for example.
“This demand is really driving our business upward post-pandemic. As far as we’re concerned, people are a big part of our offering.
“And it just gives you a bit more faith in humanity when you see people still enjoying communicating with each other – they don’t want to deal only on Teams and with machines.”
While newer players entered the market during the pandemic with slick, self-serve platforms, Corporate Traveller took a different route. It kept people at the heart of its business.
“We made a deliberate decision to stay in our lane,” Walley says. “We want the perfect blend of technology and people – we always want to keep people as our competitive edge, which is what makes us market-leading.”
Redefining premium business travel
The post-pandemic travel space looks markedly different, with expectations evolving on both sides of the booking process.
“People expect more efficiency from their travel companies, which we consistently deliver,” Walley says.
But it’s not just about speed; it’s about providing a premium experience.
“They’re going for longer trips and they want more comfort. Companies by and large are happy to pay for that, which is completely fair,” he adds.
Traveling long-haul up to eight times a year, Walley understands customers’ needs better than anyone.
“These days, you’re expected to work while you’re in the air. There’s wi-fi on all the aircraft now, which there wasn’t six years ago,” he says.
“Gone are the days when you’d get on a plane, drink some wine and watch a movie. You don’t get to switch off anymore.”
The secret sauce
Being part of the Flight Centre Travel Group gives the company something rare in the corporate travel space: direct access to leisure fares and partnerships that offer more flexibility and value.
“We are the only travel management company in the world that has a massive leisure arm,” Walley says. “Most of our competitors don’t and that changes what we can offer.”
Leisure deals often differ from corporate ones in both price and conditions, he explains. Corporate Traveller leverages joint procurement across the broader Flight Centre Travel Group to secure fare access that competitors simply don’t have. That means SMEs can get premium-level deals without premium-level spend.
Those supplier relationships go beyond pricing.
“We’ve worked with airlines, hotels and insurance companies to help them grow,” he explains. “We back the underdogs. We’ve always done that – we’re a bit of an underdog ourselves. That’s our history.”
By helping emerging airline partners grow, particularly during their early expansion into Australia, the company earns loyalty, flexibility and tailored offerings for its customers.
“That’s our DNA – finding great deals for our customers,” he says with a smile. “And we use our joint procurement to really make that work, which is a bit of our secret sauce because we have this leisure business that gives us better access.”
Positioned for global growth
The company has grown from strength to strength. And with Brisbane gearing up to host the 2032 Summer Olympics, Walley sees the city, and Queensland more broadly, entering a period of intense infrastructure investment and international visibility, which for Corporate Traveller, is a home field advantage.
“This is our home,” he says. “Flight Centre’s home is Queensland. Corporate Traveller’s home is Queensland.”
Already, the company is seeing the benefits. As Brisbane Airport expands and new stadiums rise across the city, inbound traffic is climbing. Not just from tourists either; consultants, mining clients and manufacturing firms are pouring into the region as well.
“We probably have our largest base of people here,” he says. “And we’re already seeing heaps of inbound investment.”
Queensland’s boom positions the company to act as a key gateway for global clients entering Australia, and Walley expects that momentum to build significantly in the next seven years.
“We already have a lot of those customers that are growing rapidly here,” he points out. “So we’re pretty well-positioned, I’d say, given everything that’s going on.”
Where he was meant to land
While it’s not the cockpit he once trained for, steering a global brand through turbulence has its own kind of altitude. So even though he never got to wear the uniform, Walley’s found a different kind of meritocracy – one where culture matters more than ego and success isn’t measured by stripes but by impact.
“If you do well here, you’re lauded for it. If you don’t, you’ll get the feedback,” he says, deadpan. “But you’re not fired, which is kind of nice.”
After more than two decades, he’s still here, still laughing and exactly where he’s meant to be – building a business that works for real people, led by someone who never forgot what it’s like to be one.
