Cruiseabout Searches for a New Marketing Chief as Flight Centre Bets Big on Cruise

Cruiseabout is searching for a new head of marketing after Andrea Burgess said she is relocating to Scotland in September. Burgess has led the cruise brand’s marketing team since joining in 2023, building it almost from scratch. General manager Brad Kennedy announced her exit on LinkedIn, calling the opening a chance to join “a growing business that is making big waves.”

The exit lands in the middle of a much bigger stretch for the brand and its owner, Flight Centre Travel Group (FCTG). Cruiseabout just posted its best-ever internal culture score and is hiring leaders in three cities at once, while FCTG has spent heavily expanding into the very cruise market Burgess is now heading toward.

From a Blank Website to Nine Stores

Cruiseabout is not a brand-new name. FCTG relaunched the specialist cruise retailer in Australia in August 2023, and Burgess joined two months later, before the refreshed brand even had a working website.

“I joined before the brand had even launched, back when we didn’t even have a website,” she wrote on LinkedIn. Since then, she said, the “small but mighty” marketing team has grown to four people, taking Cruiseabout “from a standing start to nine stores nationally and a loyal, engaged audience of cruise customers who keep coming back.”

Kennedy struck the same note announcing her departure. “As our legendary Head of Marketing Andrea Burgess heads off on a new exciting adventure, we are on the hunt for her replacement,” he wrote. Burgess joked about her own reasons, calling the move “a leap of faith or even just a very elaborate excuse to finally justify owning more than one jumper.”

At Cruiseabout’s first agent conference in mid-2024, she was introduced on stage as the brand’s “Captain of Marketing,” a nod to the nautical branding running through the young company’s internal culture.

The Culture Score That Capped a Six-Week Sprint

Burgess’s exit comes weeks after Cruiseabout recorded the highest employee satisfaction score of any brand inside FCTG, a 94 per cent result in its latest Great Place to Work survey. That sits comfortably above the threshold required for national certification.

The result capped a six-week stretch that included back-to-back leadership conferences at sea, one aboard Royal Caribbean’s Voyager of the Seas and another on Princess Cruises’ Crown Princess, bringing store and team leaders together from across the country.

You can’t fake a 94 per cent culture score. It’s the result of deliberately building something people genuinely want to be part of and then backing that up with experiences that bring the team together and remind everyone why they do what they do.

Brad Kennedy, Cruiseabout general manager, on the result.

The figure looks even bigger next to FCTG’s own group-wide number. Great Place to Work’s certification profile for the company shows 75 per cent of its employees say it’s a great place to work across the wider group, well below what its small cruise brand just posted alone.

Five Roles, One Small Team

Kennedy’s search for a marketing chief is not the only vacancy on Cruiseabout’s books right now. The brand has several leadership roles open at once, on top of a push for experienced travel advisors across its existing network.

New leaders get access to FCTG’s Business Ownership Scheme, which lets them invest in and share the profits of the stores they run. Kennedy has pitched it as central to the brand’s growth story.

All of it lands on a marketing function that, by Burgess’s own count, numbers just four people including the seat she is vacating. That is a small team inside a parent group employing about 12,000 people across two dozen countries. The trade outlet Travel Monitor covered the same result and drew a wider lesson from it. Workplace culture, it argued, is becoming a competitive weapon as travel brands compete harder to keep skilled staff in a tightening labour market.

Flight Centre’s Bigger Bet on Cruise

Burgess’s move to Scotland lines up, coincidentally, with a much larger push by Cruiseabout’s parent company into the United Kingdom’s cruise market. FCTG completed its acquisition of Iglu, the UK’s leading online cruise agency, in December, paying £100 million upfront with up to £27 million more in earnouts, up to £127 million in total.

Iglu runs three brands, Iglu Cruise, Planet Cruise and Iglu Ski. Together they control more than 15 per cent of UK cruise bookings and over 75 per cent of online cruise bookings in that market. FCTG managing director Graham Turner, known across Australian travel circles by his longtime nickname Skroo, called the deal a “game-changer” for the group’s cruise ambitions.

FCTG’s own announcement described cruise as one of the fastest-growing parts of its business, with sales climbing 15 to 20 per cent year on year at both companies. It is the group’s second big UK leisure purchase in three years. FCTG bought luxury operator Scott Dunn in January 2023 for a deal reported at more than £120 million.

The Iglu deal pushes FCTG deeper into the UK, a market the Cruise Lines International Association (CLIA) ranks as the world’s third-largest for cruising. FCTG expects the acquisition to nearly double its cruise-related total transaction value (TTV), pushing it past $2 billion annualised in FY26, two years ahead of schedule. A fresh target of $3 billion by FY28 is now in place.

Why Is Cruising Booming Right Now?

Cruising is booming because record numbers of travellers keep coming back for more, and cruise lines keep adding new ships to meet them. Global passenger volume hit a record 37.2 million in 2025, and nearly nine in ten past cruisers say they plan to sail again.

• 1.08 million Australians took a cruise in 2025, a local record, as passenger numbers grew 16 per cent in a single year.
• Australia’s cruise sector generated $5.63 billion for the national economy in 2022-23 and supported more than 18,000 jobs, according to state tourism figures.
• About one in three cruise guests worldwide are now under 40, a shift reshaping how agencies like Cruiseabout market their trips.
• Eleven new ocean-going ships worth more than US$10 billion combined entered service across CLIA member lines in 2025 alone.

That growth explains the scramble to fill Cruiseabout’s marketing seat quickly. A four-year-old brand riding a record global travel category needs more hands than the ones who built it from scratch.

Where Burgess Is Headed Next

Burgess’s own LinkedIn profile already lists her location as Edinburgh, months ahead of her formal September departure.

Scotland’s own numbers make it an unlikely draw for arriving workers right now. The country’s population growth has slowed to a near crawl, with net migration into the country falling 62 per cent. Burgess is heading there anyway, for reasons that have nothing to do with job markets or population targets.

Kennedy’s post set no closing date for applications. Burgess’s remaining months in Australia now double as handover time for a marketing function she built from nothing, before she settles into her new home in September.