Darrin Grafton and the art of getting there

The bathroom doubled as the conference-call room. Before Serko became a listed travel technology company, Darrin Grafton and Bob Shaw worked from a room at Auckland’s Heritage Hotel. They had cleared out the beds to make space for a business. Prospective employees had to be persuaded that an interview in a hotel room was a legitimate career opportunity. Corporate travel, in this instance, had produced a rather unconventional corporate address.

Grafton tells the story with evident amusement. An earlier workplace, beneath a flat, acquired the grand title of the Subterranean Innovation Centre. The names were getting ahead of the property portfolio. Yet those improvised offices housed a partnership that endured through successive businesses. When Serko took shape in 2007, its founders had already spent years learning how the travel industry worked, where its software failed and who would pay to fix it.

There is a pleasing circularity here. A founder who once borrowed the architecture of hospitality for an office has spent much of his working life trying to make travel easier for other people. The scenery has improved. The problem keeps expanding. A booking is a small transaction; getting somebody to a meeting, then home again, is a much larger undertaking. Grafton has built his career in the space between the two.

The farm came before the software

He grew up on a dairy farm in Waimauku, outside Auckland, helping before and after school. Maths appealed to him, especially patterns and problems. His school reports nevertheless returned to the same verdict: he could do better. Grafton later recalled being a talkative pupil. It is an encouraging detail for anyone whose school report reads more like an early warning than a reference.

Computers arrived later, at Carrington Polytechnic, now Unitec. Without an earlier grounding in them, he initially struggled with the course. A teacher gave him extra help until the concepts began to fit together. The practical thinker had found a practical route into an abstract subject. He and Shaw both went on to work at IMaCS, creating corporate accounting software in COBOL.

The farm and the accounting work belong in the same story. Both put consequences next to calculations. A system has to serve somebody doing a job, and that person has little reason to admire the ingenuity inside it when the job remains difficult. Grafton’s later interest in simplifying travel has that same practical emphasis: the useful question concerns what the person can now get done.

A partnership, then a piece for everyone

Grafton and Shaw established Interactive Technologies Limited in 1994, working on travel agencies’ mid-office and back-office systems. By 2000 an early Serko Online product was bringing business travel booking onto the internet. Serko itself followed in 2007 after the sale of ITL. The sequence matters. This was a business built through close acquaintance with the unglamorous plumbing of travel, long before an attractive booking screen could make the whole thing look straightforward.

The ownership decision at the new company was unusually direct: staff received 40% at the start. That account also features in Grafton’s Grounds Up conversation, alongside the long relationship with Shaw and the need to reinvent the business repeatedly. Giving colleagues a stake put something tangible behind the language of shared endeavour. A company can describe its people as partners for free. Shares require rather more conviction.

There is another, smaller expression of belonging. Grafton has described a company tradition in which new colleagues paint a tile with their dreams, aspirations or what they want from working at Serko. The tiles join the larger company picture. It is an unusually literal answer to a familiar management problem: how to make an individual feel visible inside an organisation that keeps growing. Each contribution remains part of what everybody else sees.

The conductor has to listen

His public discussion of inclusion has a personal register. In 2023 he spoke about the responsibility attached to a leader’s words, and about the importance of the company’s values to him as a father as well as a chief executive. He described bringing people together regardless of who they are as something that mattered personally. That gives the cultural language a meaning beyond recruitment copy.

Recognition followed the business’s growth. Grafton received the INFINZ Leadership Award in 2021. Describing his role then, he used the image of a conductor: somebody coaching capable people into a team. His stated objective was to surround himself with talent that could take Serko further. The aspiration was deliberately self-deprecating. The chief executive did not need to win every argument or supply every good idea.

The ambition attached to that team was substantial: to reach 20% of the world’s business travellers. That remains an ambition, rather than an accomplished market share. It also explains why a company based in Auckland would spend so much time looking outward. The home market could provide a beginning. Grafton’s intended audience was scattered across airports, offices and hotel rooms far beyond it.

In August 2026, asked to compress his years in business, he answered, ‘Culture and people.’ Asked about the future, he chose responsibility. By then the task included keeping teams across New Zealand, Australia, China, India and the United States aligned as products changed. He described workshops explaining the strategy and the reasons for it. Reinvention asks people to relinquish familiar work; explaining the destination becomes part of the work itself.

“Culture and people.”

Darrin Grafton, August 2026

Getting into the room with bigger neighbours

Serko listed on the NZX in 2014 and added an ASX listing in 2018. Grafton appeared on Business Travel News’s list of 25 influential business travel executives in 2014, then again in 2024. Those dates bracket a decade of moving from a regional base toward a wider market. The second recognition came as Serko agreed to buy GetThere from Sabre, a transaction announced at US$12 million.

GetThere brought a recognised brand and a customer base that included substantial corporate travel programmes. The transaction also established a continuing partnership with Sabre, covering product development, investment and commercial activity. Grafton’s October 2024 account set out the underlying intention: expand in North America while building new capabilities for the companies that arrange travel and the people who actually take the trips.

That distinction is easy to miss from an aeroplane seat. Behind a company trip sit a traveller, an employer, a travel manager, an agency and suppliers, each with different requirements. A convenient choice for one can create work for another. Serko’s partnership approach places its software inside those relationships. The task involves making a journey easier while allowing other businesses to keep serving their customers.

Booking.com for Business opened another route, towards smaller companies. David Holyoke joined Serko in July 2024 to lead its unmanaged travel business after working on Airbnb’s corporate travel offering. His arrival put an experienced operator beside the opportunity Grafton was describing. A five-year renewal of the Booking.com partnership had already been announced that year. Growth required both a distribution relationship and people who understood the customers arriving through it.

The numbers come with obligations

By the year ended March 31, 2026, Serko reported NZ$120.9 million in total income, up 34%. Booking.com for Business completed room nights rose 31% to 4.3 million, while its active customer count reached 301,000. GetThere contributed a full year of revenue. The figures show the distance travelled from the improvised office, although distance alone is a poor measure of how comfortably a company is running.

The same results reported a NZ$17.7 million net loss after tax. Positive underlying operating earnings and a statutory loss can coexist, and here they did. Grafton’s familiar emphasis on cash discipline belongs beside the growth figures. More bookings create opportunity; product development and international operations still have to be paid for. The arithmetic has a way of declining invitations to celebrate early.

He has long argued that founders must learn to delegate and accept a smaller holding in a larger enterprise. Away from work, he has described time with family and friends, fishing and being on the water around the Tutukaka coast. He also admitted that weekends away could generate ideas that kept his executive team busy on his return. Apparently a switched-off chief executive is not always an entirely restful prospect for the office.

A trip that needs less managing

The latest product gives that restless imagination a concrete test. On October 13, 2026, Serko officially launched Serko.ai in the United States. Its announced proposition is a personal travel assistant: describe the trip in ordinary language, let the system arrange it within company policy, and have it monitor the journey for changes. Booking becomes the start of an ongoing service rather than the final click in a transaction.

The launch also described cancellation arrangements that return money to the business, with defined cutoffs before flight departure or hotel check-in. These are product promises with operational detail attached. For Grafton, the direction fits an argument he has made for years: the traveller should spend less time negotiating the machinery of travel. Whether a person reaches a meeting and gets home as planned supplies a fairly unforgiving test.

Serko’s own Auckland surroundings have acquired a different sort of permanence. Its 2026 account of Serko House describes a building erected for wool storage in 1911 and later occupied by Saatchi & Saatchi for 35 years. The timber and brick remain, along with an Otis Frizzell artwork titled Behave. For a business intent on changing familiar habits, keeping that instruction on the wall shows a welcome sense of humour.

The early hotel room and the old wool building make an apt pair. Neither was originally intended for what Grafton and his colleagues asked it to do. His career has repeatedly involved finding another use for familiar things: accounting knowledge, industry relationships, booking technology, the experience of travellers themselves. The next version carries more automation and a larger audience. Its purpose is still easy to recognise. Somebody has somewhere to be.