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The independent travel sector is proving a golden ticket for private equity as millennials and baby boomers alike shun traditional package holidays for new adventures in offbeat destinations, as Robert Buckland reports.
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Long gone are the days when choosing a holiday meant browsing a glossy brochure full of similar-looking hotels on the Costas before taking your deposit to the local high street travel agent for a fortnight in the sun.
Now we’re all after ‘experiential’ breaks and ‘off-radar’ trips that combine culture and history with adventure.
Environmental and social concerns are also driving a demand for more sustainable forms of tourism, including using smaller, local hotels instead of multinational operators.
According to market research group Mintel, there’s a growing importance of “group compatibility and themed itineraries, with travellers attracted to tours built around shared identity and special interests, such as fitness or pop culture, rather than traditional sightseeing alone.”
It also points to the growing influence of wellbeing and what it calls “active, achievement-led experiences”.
As a result, many of the generic, mass-market holiday operators have packed their bags to be replaced by those offering bespoke packages based on individual tastes.
Once viewed as niche players, these firms are becoming the go-to sites for well-heeled travellers willing to pay more for bespoke holidays.
Much of their success is based on combining their ability to access powerful booking software for flights and hotels with specialist knowledge and local connections.
Not surprisingly, PE firms have been active in the sector, according to PitchBook providing a record total of £7.7bn last year for 31 deals – nearly double the previous high in the post-Covid boom year of 2022.
Piper has been particularly active, having taken part in four investment rounds in the sector since 2020.
The first of these, an £8m investment in high-end, curated villa rental company, The Thinking Traveller, set the direction of travel for the market.
At the time investment director Dan Stern, who has led on all four deals, said: “Although the travel industry has been badly hit by COVID, our consumer insight work shows that people are more eager than ever to see new countries and experience new cultures.”
Since then, Piper has put £8m into Rabbie’s, an Edinburgh-based small-group guided tours firm, backed Martin Randall Travel, a leading specialist in cultural tours with more than 200 events in 50 different countries, and co-founded an MBO at Bristol-based Asian tour specialist Inside Travel.
Describing itself as “the world’s leading Asia-focused cultural adventure” brand, Inside Travel’s buyout was also backed by Cool Japan Fund, Japan’s sovereign wealth fund focused on investing in businesses that promote Japanese culture around the world.
The business was founded in 2000 by Simon King and Alastair Donnelly, who, having spent three years living in Japan and experiencing its food, iconic sights, traditions and pop culture, returned to the UK with a deep passion for the country.
Realising that tour operator offerings didn’t fully capture everyday Japanese culture, they launched what was then called Inside Japan to share a more authentic experience with others.
It has since created trips for clients to South Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia and Borneo, among others, achieving sales of £65m-plus by 2024 and growing by 33% a year.
Global tailor-made holidays brand and managed marketplace TravelLocal, also based in Bristol, raised £8.3m in a series B investment round from Puma, Active Partners and Gresham House Ventures and existing investors, with Channel 4 Ventures also increasing its media-for-equity investment.
TravelLocal’s business model is based on revolutionising tailor-made holidays by connecting its customers directly with handpicked, trusted local travel experts based in their destination – people know their country better than anyone.
Its platform enables bookings with more than 500 individual local travel experts around the world, who create personalised itineraries directly with the holidaymaker.
At the time of the investment three years ago, TravelLocal had an annual growth rate of 100%, having merged two years earlier with Berlin-based Trip.me.
Other PE deals in the sector have included BGF’s 2024 acquisition of a minority stake in Vosaio Travel, which designs bespoke group tours and travel programmes primarily for local market tour operators in 25 countries, and – in the same year – ECI Partners’ takeover of TAG, known for providing complex and bespoke travel itineraries for high-end corporate clients and entertainment industry bigwigs.
The Loveholidays story, as told by CEO Donat Retif and Daniel Smith of Livingbridge at the UK Private Capital Summit, underlines why travel remains a compelling bet for growth investors – provided you back the right platform and stay the course when the cycle turns.
For Livingbridge, the attraction started with the fundamentals: a huge, established UK package holiday market – around £15bn at entry – undergoing rapid online migration. Loveholidays was a pure-play on that shift, “tech-first from birth”, already proving the model by hitting £10m profit within four years. The business had strong unit economics, a clear digital proposition, and sat in a category where consumer demand was deep, frequent and price-sensitive – ideal conditions for a data-driven, high-volume platform.
Scalability is where the model really bites. When Retif arrived in late 2019, Loveholidays was still a relatively small, UK-focused player, concentrated on short-haul beach. Post-Covid, it has tripled both the size of the business and its market share in a market that itself has expanded from 26m to 39m package holiday customers. It now competes credibly with Tui, Jet2, Booking and easyJet, and has grown into the third-largest operator in its competitive set.
The levers are classic digital scale: a rebuilt platform, a strengthened leadership team drawn from bigger B2B SaaS and other industries, and expansion across products (short-haul, long-haul, city breaks) and markets (now eight countries, heading to ten and beyond). Crucially, this is software-led internationalisation: entering a new country is largely a matter of translating the website and localising the offer. Retif notes that what once cost £300,000 and took three months now costs “about £5” and takes minutes thanks to AI – a neat illustration of how technology compounds competitive advantage in online travel.
The pandemic was the real test of the investment thesis – and of the partnership. Travel demand collapsed, it became illegal to travel, and Loveholidays had to process £360m of flight refunds while running two restructurings and a full platform rebuild. Where many peers cut back hard, Livingbridge backed management to double down on technology rather than retreat. Founder Al Francis still stepped back as CEO in May 2020 as planned, handing full operational control to Retif at the height of the crisis.
That alignment – investors providing capital, regulatory support and air cover, management focusing on execution – meant Loveholidays emerged from Covid leaner, more scalable and significantly larger. For Livingbridge, the bet that a tech-first, AI-enabled platform could take share in a structurally growing sector has clearly paid off.
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The Growth Awards recognise the people, teams and businesses that have made meaningful progress. Whatever your journey, we want to hear what made the difference.
The awards are free, simple and quick to enter. The deadline is Friday 18 September.
Our judging panel will select the shortlist, choose five categories for site visits, and then select our Growth Awards winners.
To enter the awards visit: Growth Awards 2027.
The awards will work across all our regions, and span three strands – Company, Team and Individual – with categories recognising everything from finance, technology, people and board excellence.
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