Start-up search engine inspiremyholiday.com has confirmed plans to sign new trade partners ahead of the post Covid-19 upturn.
The privately funded business has appointed Tom Dale and Lockie Kerr as business development consultants with the aim of signing new partners following its initial six months in operation.
Inspiremyholiday.com aims to attract consumers at the earliest stages of planning a trip. Software matches consumers to their ideal destination, hotel and tour operator or agent by offering search criteria needed in their next holiday destination, such as weather, flight duration, culture, adventure and activities.
It is the brainchild of industry veterans Oliver Lomas and Norma Meyer and aims for 350,000 unique visitors in the first 12 months.
The company – which already works with Lastminute.com, One&Only Resorts, booking.com, CV Villas, Expedia and Newmarket Holidays – has spent the lockdown period fine-tuning bespoke search technology.
Kerr joins from Topdeck Travel and Back-Roads Touring, where he was sales manager UK and Europe. He will focus on tour operators, agents and touring business.
Dale spent the last four years as head of purchasing, Americas and Caribbean at dnata.
Oliver Lomas, director and founder of inspiremyholiday.com, said: “While the whole travel industry has endured an incredibly difficult few months, there is no doubt that there will be a huge pent-up demand for holidays in the months to come.
“Every holiday business should be looking at the way it acquires new customers, and that is where slick players such as inspiremyholiday.com can help, whatever your budget is. We target consumers who are undecided on their destination and using a simple and effective search engine we enable the consumer to qualify themselves and link off to our partners driving truly incremental sales to our partners.”
Lomas added that the business had conducted a poll of more than 3,000 UK consumers to discover their holiday intentions.
While the domestic market came out on top (17%), the majority of Britons said they would head to European destinations (47% in total). Top choices were Spain (9%), Italy (8.3%), Greece (5.3%) and France (3.3%).
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