The brands
- 12,000employees worldwide
- 6source markets
- 120destinations
- 4.1€ billion turnover
- 8million guests annually
- 13.5% market share of the German market
- 70+own & managed hotels
- 100%organic growth
2018/19 business year
Brand diversity of the FTI GROUP
The FTI GROUP is broadly positioned with various brands and subsidiaries. It consists of FTI Touristik, the last-minute operator 5vorFlug, the car rental broker driveFTI, the Destination Management Company Meeting Point International (operating in more than 40 locations worldwide) and BigXtra, a tour operator for promotional products. Under the umbrella of the hospitality company Meeting Point Hotels the GROUP’s five hotel brands thrive: LABRANDA Hotels & Resorts, Design Plus Hotels, Kairaba Hotels & Resorts, the budget concept Lemon & Soul and Club Sei. Also, the FTI GROUP has consolidated its franchise systems in its subsidiary Touristik Vertriebsgesellschaft mbH (TVG) with the brands sonnenklar.TV Reisebuero, 5vorflug and Flugboerse.
The tour operator manages its product portfolio in over 10,000 partner travel agencies in Germany. Other important distribution channels are the travel shopping channel sonnenklar.TV and the online B2B provider for hotel bookings, Youtravel. The consolidator FTI Ticketshop is responsible for scheduled flight ticket sales.
In Austria FTI is represented by a subsidiary in Linz, while FTI Touristik AG is located in Basel, Switzerland. The French tour operator FTI Voyages has been part of the FTI Group since 2012. In 2016 the group has entered the Dutch market with FTI Reizen. Eight service center, such as erf24 and travianet, handle bookings from the FTI GROUP and external customers. Headquartered in Munich, the FTI GROUP employs 12,000 staff worldwide and expects a forecast revenue of 4.1 billion euros in the fiscal year 2018/19.
The global reach of the FTI GROUP
FTI’s tour operator arm offers holidays in 120+ countries. The Group’s subsidiary, Meeting Point International operates in 20 countries. In 2018/19 FTI GROUP serviced 8 million customers.
Stabilization measures in context of the Corona pandemic
In order to overcome the unprecedented crisis in tourism caused by Covid-19, the FTI GROUP has taken various measures since 2020 that position the company strongly for the post-pandemic period. Part of the stabilization packages are a clear focus on the core business, leaner structures in the operative sector and the initiation of a multi-year transition process and a broad-based liquidity hedge. Therefore, the FTI GROUP – among other things – accepted offers made available to the industry by the German federal government.
The tour operator group is using the funds granted by the economic stabilization fund (WSF) in the form of a silent partnership and a loan in order to accelerate its transformation and, for example, to advance digitalization processes.
These include the cloud migration of the FTI GROUP servers completed at the end of 2020, the global rollout of the merchandise management system Arkadia for more automation and efficiency in the Destination Management Company segment, as well as the global rollout of Atcore as software for the automation of hotel contracts and for a better Time2Market performance in data exchange with the i5 booking system, or the conversion of multilingual travel information for 136 countries from printed customer documents to pdfs or links with the help of the cmi24 content management system – to name just a few important milestones. The modernization steps in workflows and IT landscapes that have already been implemented and are still planned create synergies, increase efficiency, facilitate resource-efficient work, and thus contribute to cost reductions and increased competitiveness in all areas of the company.
The FTI GROUP is being particularly innovative with the introduction of the eMag in January 2021. The Group is the first major tour operator to largely dispense with printed seasonal and annual catalogs, demonstrating its contemporary understanding of the customer and reaffirming its commitment to greater sustainability and climate neutrality. This not only saves paper in large quantities, as up to now around 1.6 billion catalog pages were produced each season in Germany alone, but also avoids the corresponding emissions from printing to delivery. Instead, with the eMag, the FTI GROUP provides a digital medium with up-to-the-minute data, numerous additional information and features, image galleries, video material, useful cross-links and much more for both travel agencies and customers.
The eMag is thus a showcase project that exists both under the sign of the digital transformation and from an ecological point of view. In the same spirit, the FTI GROUP is also pursuing the Green Travel Transformation of the GTI in collaboration with other representatives of the industry. After researching and a qualitative validation of all globally circulating sustainability certificates for hotel facilities, a uniform labelling was implemented in 2020 in the Amadeus/Bistro booking system, the most widely used booking system in Germany, in order to be able to better include sustainable hotels when providing travel advice.
Along with the group's main location in Munich, which has been awarded as particularly sustainable according to LEED, the passionate commitment to biodiversity with the active assumption of several bee sponsorships, and the social commitment to local charity projects, the FTI GROUP continues to adhere to its ecological and social responsibility in the course of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals, even in challenging times. With the help of the granted WSF funds, the Group continues to pursue its corporate policy in this regard. For example, in addition to the aforementioned major projects eMag and Green Travel Transformation, an automatically calculated offset contribution per ton of CO2 for each WINDROSE Finest Travel booking has gone to myclimate since 2021. A mobile working policy introduced in 2021 and a license for MS Teams implemented for all employees also reduce travel distances and the need for business trips, thus making a contribution to reducing emissions. Further projects below the banner of ecological and digital transformation are being planned.