Flight Centre Travel Group (FCTG) has appointed Darren “Daz” Wright as global chief marketing officer for its leisure division, including the Flight Centre brand and Travel Associates.

Wright will have global responsibility for overall brand strategy, customer insights and engagement, marketing operations and technology, and worldwide retail.

He will be based at Flight Centre’s Brisbane headquarters, reporting to FCTG’s chief executive of global leisure, Melanie Waters-Ryan.

With a marketing degree under his belt, Wright joined the company in 1996 as the marketing chief for the local Flight Centre and Great Holiday Escape retail brands.

After leaving FCTG in 2001, he held various senior marketing and commercial roles with Virgin Blue, AirAsia and Scoot. Wright re-joined FCTG in 2014 as head of marketing for the group’s Australian leisure brands.

Waters-Ryan said that while the past 18 months have been a tough time for FCTG’s leisure brands, the company has used this time to “reinvent ourselves and gear up for a bright future”.

“We are moving our brands to a new level of engagement and want to ensure a global approach delivers irresistible deals for our clients from a brand that is savvy online and offline, in a mass retail or premium leisure context,” she said.

“Daz’s ability to deliver marketing and brand strategies that engage our customers will be key to making our brands stick.”

Commenting on his promotion, Wright said: “I am very excited to take on this new role in the group and ramp up the design of our core global business systems.

“The road ahead is to further re-invigorate the Flight Centre brand when speaking to our existing customers, as well as engage a new younger audience looking for security and advice from our collective travel experience.”

“As we continue FCTG’s globalisation, we are focused on building scalable capabilities with core agency support from long-term partners such as Rapid Media in Australia.

“We will be looking at new agency agreements globally supporting smaller more agile in-house teams to drive success.”