The Flight Centre Travel Group (FTL) has unveiled a new share-based retention scheme, called the Global Recovery Rights programme, which has been designed to benefit the company’s global sales force and support staff.

Under the new Global Recovery Rights programme (GPR), staff across the globe (excluding board members and senior executives) will be granted share rights if they continue their careers with the company through to December 31^st 2022. The scheme comes as a response to COVID-19 and its ongoing impacts on the company’s people.

In total, about 7,500 FLT people are expected to receive about 1.9million shares under the programme at an expected non-cash cost of circa 30million Australian dollars, based on today’s share price (dated 25^th June 2021).

This covers 850 people based in the UK, with a total of 1,250 in Europe, across all Flight Centre Travel Group brands including Flight Centre UK, FCM Travel and Corporate Traveller UK.

Most participants will receive one-off GPR grant of 250 share rights, which will vest in February 2023, when the company will release its December 2022 half-yearly results.

Steve Norris, UK Managing Director at Flight Centre Travel Group said the GPR programme was designed with the key strategic objectives, including:

• Investing in and retaining people who would be integral to the company’s recovery post COVID-19
• Sharehold value creation
• Preserving cash, while governments continue to impose heavy travel restrictions that were severely impacting demand for travel

Steve Norris said: 

“The GPR programme underlines our people’s importance and recognises their efforts and loyalty since the pandemic began and heavy travel restrictions were imposed, adversely impacting their earning potential while they continued to work incredibly hard to help our customers secure refunds or rearrange their travel plans.

“It is first and foremost a retention programme that encourages our people to continue their careers with us during what we believe will be an important 18-month period as vaccination programmes progress, trading conditions start to normalise and the recovery starts to gain momentum.

“In addition to being aligned with our strategic objectives, this new programme also gives our people a stronger degree of ownership of our company and thereby strengths the ties between their interests and those of our other shareholders in the mid-long term.”