Travel Republic – the death of dynamic packaging?

The announcement that the Dnata group is to close Travel Republic hot on the heels of On the Beach’s closure of its dynamic packaging (DP) trade arm makes it feel like the end of the era for independent DP in the UK.

 

I’ve been deeply involved with the dynamic packaging sector since its inception as a founder of On Holiday Group alongside partners Bill Allen (On the Beach) and Brian Young (G Adventures). I also spent many enjoyable hours in Kingston pubs with Travel Republic’s founders, discussing strategy and exit options.

 

Unfortunately, On Holiday Group’s VAT dispute with HMRC halted merger talks and the guys became wealthy young men when selling to Dnata in December 2011, which now appears to have been at the business’s peak.

 

At that point they were serving more than two million customers annually and had seen turnover rise by over 40% to more than £400 million in 2011, making Travel Republic the clear OTA leader at that time.

 

Sensibly, Dnata tied in the leadership of the business, Kane Pirie and Paul Furner, through deferred payments for a further three years. But the business never prospered in the same way again and like many acquisitions lost its entrepreneurial drive and quick decision-making.

 

Only Dnata insiders will understand how Travel Republic ended up licensed for fewer than 150,000 passengers in 2025, dropping out of the top 20 Atol holders for the first time in 20 years.

 

However, I point to three key factors.

 

Ryanair: no dynamic packaging business can survive without it

The massive disruption caused by Covid-19 and Ryanair’s outrageous behaviour towards OTAs led to a legal battle between Ryanair and Dnata, during which Travel Republic removed Ryanair from sale for four years between 2021 and May 2025.

 

Affordable seat access is the lifeblood of any DP engine, and while competitors On the Beach and Love Holidays worked tirelessly to find workarounds to continue selling Ryanair during its openly declared war on OTAS, Dnata took the decision that it did not need the airline and, in doing so, in my opinion destroyed the Travel Republic business as a competitive force.

 

I feel free to say this in hindsight as I openly expressed this to the Dnata management at the time and felt great sympathy for the team which did not have the power to overturn a decision made at the highest levels of the owner, Emirates.

 

Ryanair is the lowest-cost flight provider and is estimated to account for approximately 60% of both Loveholidays’ and On the Beach’s flight seats, with both businesses booming again after the Ryanair trade reconciliation.

 

Not having access to Ryanair has strangled Travel Republic as high easyJet API fees have squeezed OTA profits and Jet2’s in-house tour operations have increased, forcing it to reposition itself as a long-haul and Dubai-focused operation.

 

The Covid-19 Google algorithm reset

OTAs in general navigated Covid-19 much better than integrated tour operators like Tui because they have a much more flexible model with no planes on the ground and no guaranteed or owned hotels sitting empty.

 

However, Covid-19 disrupted the hierarchy of Google visibility which protected the top-three players’ volumes.

 

The Google ‘history’ algorithm essentially means you pay less to be in the number-one search position if you have been there for the last six months, which in effect blocks new entrants who have fought their way to the top at great cost (why Lowcostholidays eventually failed).

 

This created a relatively fixed and unchanging access to customers before Covid-19.

 

However, the shutdown wiped away this history, turning it into a race between the major players to re-establish the pecking order once the bounce-back started.

 

As a privately held company, Love Holidays was able to be much more aggressive than On the Beach or Travel Republic, gaining massive market share post-Covid-19 and causing Travel Republic to spiral into consistent losses which ultimately led to its demise.

 

Corporate strangulation

I am unusual in that I had a successful corporate career, rising to deputy chief operating officer of MyTravel (Airtours) and running all its UK business in 2003, before becoming the rogue entrepreneur of my later career.

 

This provides me with insight into how corporate cultures have repeatedly undermined and dismantled nearly every acquisition in travel.

 

People are central to every travel business because the most successful consistently focus on customers and brands and take great pride in the businesses they have built.

 

Every time things get tough, corporate accountants start seeking cost savings by merging IT, finance, and customer services across the business, which destroys its focus.

 

With Travel Republic, Dnata began using its technology across other divisions, taking the focus away from its UK activities, then compounded this by bringing the hotel buying team in to help start a corporate-wide bed bank called Yalago.

 

I’m sure these seemed sensible corporate decisions at the time, but inevitably they damaged the Travel Republic operation and, when combined with remote and disconnected decision-making about Ryanair, it ultimately put the business into a downward spiral it has never recovered from.

 

I know many clever and persistent people who have worked at Travel Republic and other Dnata-owned businesses over the years, and most have enjoyed working for what is a generous and considerate organisation.

 

However, I don’t think Travel Republic marks the end of the dynamic packaging era. It’s simply a natural shift, with new currents hitting the UK industry. Smaller, more tightly managed businesses are able to react and change direction more quickly.

 

I clearly don’t know the inside story, but hopefully my analysis, written at 4am in the Dominican Republic, shows how much I care about the topic.