Leaders from Helloworld, Flight Centre Travel Group, Travellers Choice, the Council of Australian Tour Operators (CATO) and the Association of Travel Management Companies (ATMC) took on the market, AI, training and next-gen talent at Beyond Borders 2026 in Melbourne. Matt Leedham reports.
Asked the near-impossible question of where the industry goes next, five of Australia’s most senior travel leaders were realistic about the challenges and optimistic about the people facing them.
Moderated by Australian Travel Industry Association (ATIA) CEO Dean Long at the sold-out Beyond Borders 2026 summit, the leaders’ panel brought together ATIA chair and Travellers Choice CEO Christian Hunter, Helloworld Travel executive director Cinzia Burnes, Flight Centre Travel Group global leisure CEO James Kavanagh (JK), CATO chair Sean Martin (G Adventures) and ATMC chair David Goldman (Goldman Travel).
It followed ATIA‘s morning update on advocacy wins, the surcharging fight and new member dashboards.
Demand shifts; it doesn’t stop
JK said Flight Centre Travel Group’s last six months split in half: a tough final quarter of the financial year, then a record July.
“We’ll never get certainty. The world is uncertain… But what we need is confidence, and that’s what this room does,” JK said.
The cost of going it alone
On the Fiji tourism tax, scrapped for bookings made before 1 September after a collective effort from ATIA, Burnes said no single voice would have reached the High Commissioner.
Martin, three months after CATO merged with ATIA, pointed to Nepal, where tour operator toolkits went out the morning the floods hit.
“That simplicity of one has made things a lot more efficient for all our members,” he said.
The bedrock of trust
Flight Centre Travel Group was the launch partner and first customer of the CATO Touring Academy, the online touring certification that Martin said now has close to 4,000 active participants.
For JK, that investment comes back to standards. Accreditation, he said, tells customers they’re dealing with someone trained to deliver the right product at the right time and gives the industry’s many new recruits a development pathway.
“Standards are really the bedrock of trust,” he said.
He admitted Flight Centre hasn’t told that story loudly enough. “I’d mark us down a little bit,” he said, pointing to the UK, where you won’t find a supplier without accreditation all over its documentation.
“If I had one ask here as well for everybody in the room, it’s rethink what accreditation means,” he said.
Echoing the value of association standards, Long said ATIA rejected 22 per cent of accreditation applications last year.
Humans in control
On the much-discussed topic of AI, Hunter said keeping the human in the loop isn’t enough. “The human needs to stay in control,” he said.
Burnes described it as “automation implementation rather than artificial intelligence”, while Goldman borrowed a line from Virtuoso’s Matthew Upchurch: “Automate the predictable, so you can humanise the exceptional.”
JK said he thinks about it every day. It took 30 years for the internet to reach 65 per cent of bookings online, he added, and AI is expected to move twice as fast, with 20 per cent of the profit pool tipped to shift to the quickest movers.
His challenge: imagine a slice of your value chain disappearing overnight. “How would you respond?”
Born in the year of the iPhone
The sharpest question came from the floor: how does an industry holding so much sensitive data protect it when new recruits were “born the year of the iPhone”?
JK said Flight Centre receives roughly 6,000 applications for travel roles each year and hires hundreds, with inductions now running longer due to compliance modules and live simulations.
“It’s problematic, and I think it’s going to hit every business,” he said, calling for data standards to be built into accreditation.
One wish?
Long closed with a speed round: one wish for the industry over the next 12 months.
Goldman wanted a calmer world and the next generation coming through, and Martin echoed the call for calm. Hunter, admitting it was corny, went with world peace. All were sentiments that resonated strongly with the audience.
“Hopefully, tourism can be seen as a career rather than a transition,” Burnes said.
“More disruption, more acceptance, more travel… the most important thing is that we work together and grow together,” JK said.
KARRYON UNPACKS: For all the talk of AI, the panel kept circling back to people: who trains them, who accredits them and whether they stay. An industry rejecting more than one in five accreditation applications while chasing the next generation suggests the bar is rising faster than the pipeline.
