The company revealed on Thursday its profit before tax was $325.4 million for the 2017 financial year, down 5.7 per cent from the previous year.

Significant airfare discounts hurt earnings as the company takes a percentage of each transaction, but the trend started to normalise in the second half of the year, the travel group said.

"Overall yields in international airfares up till about six months ago have been trending down for the last few years as we get more competition," Flight Centre chief executive Graham Turner told Fairfax Media.

"But international airfares have stabilised over the last six months. It doesn't mean that people aren't discounting, but the average level of airfares has been fairly stable."

That trend would continue in 2018, and while discount fares would still be available, they would be less frequent and have fewer seats available for each deal, Mr Turner said.

Flight Centres earnings were also hurt by global political uncertainty in the first quarter of 2017, with the Brexit vote particularly disruptive, Mr Turner said.

While total revenue increased 1.4 per cent to $2.7 billion in 2017, the group's income margin - or how much of a cut it got from each airfare or other products sold - slipped 0.3 per cent.

That was because the company was moving more towards corporate travel and online sales, which both have lower margins, it said.

Mr Turner said those areas were growing but its core bricks-and-mortar leisure retail business remained the most important part of its business.

"We've just got a little bit of tweaking and rationalisation to do that in a few areas to improve our cost basis and our bottom line," Mr Turner said.

Flight Centre also unveiled a business transformation program designed to grow revenue, make the company more efficient and cut costs by boosting sales volumes.

This would be achieved by increasing the company's average sales value by 7 per cent a year and returning its net profit margin to 2 per cent, from 1.6 per cent in 2017.

Flight Centre owns a string of travel operations across the globe and said on Thursday it would be exiting all unprofitable businesses as part of the turnaround plan.

Macquarie analyst Sam Dobson said the market appeared to have reacted to the sales and margin growth targets in Flight Centre's transformation plan.

"One of the issues for them is they're looking to obtain that growth rate in an environment where airline capacity growth and overall travel growth may not support it," he said.

"The second issue is that they are seeing and expect to see income margin pressure in the next couple of years."

Flight Centre's underlying pre-tax profit of $329.5 million, excluding one-off costs, came in at the top-end of its own forecast, which it had downgraded last November from between $320 to $355 million to between $300 million and $330 million.

Its shares soared in morning trade to their highest value since mid-2014 and closed up 10.6 per cent at $49.10.

Flight Centre declared a final dividend of 94??, bringing its full-year payout to $1.39 a share to be paid on October 13.