The co-founders of Holidaysplease have put more than 40 travel domain names and websites up for sale, two years after selling the homeworking group.
Former directors Charles Duncombe, Richard Dixon and Sonia Dixon, who no longer work in the travel industry, acquired the names through Holidaysplease in 2009 for just under £100,000 in total, with the intention of rolling them out to generate leads for the group’s agents.
However, the names were never used, and when Holidaysplease was sold to Travel Counsellors in 2023, they were left out of the sale and retained by the founders.
The three are all shareholders in a company called Travel Leads, a holding company for the domain names, some of which have pages of content but are not trading sites.
Duncombe described the sale as a “once in a lifetime” opportunity for travel agents, tour operators, airlines, marketing companies, tourist boards or startups seeking an instant way to generate business.
The portfolio of URLs includes general travel and long-haul destination-specific domain names, such as antiguaholidays.com, australiaholidays.com, barbadosholidays.com, canadaholidays.co.uk and honeymoons.org.
Duncombe, whose only remaining tie with the industry is as a non-executive director of tour operator Latin Routes, said: “When we were at Holidaysplease we bought about 45 names from someone who had bought them and not done anything with them.
“The idea was to set up websites with the domain names to build up leads for our homeworkers. As it turned out, the Holidaysplease website generated enough leads to keep the homeworkers busy, and Travel Counsellors generated its own sales leads, so it didn’t need them.”
Duncombe estimates the names will each sell for a four to five-figure sum and is offering them initially to the travel industry.
“I think they will be worth more than we paid for them,” he said. Duncombe believes a website created using any of the names could “easily” generate more than 1,000 leads per month, potentially with average booking values of more than £5,000.
“Even if you only converted leads into sales at [a rate of] 5%, then that would be more than a quarter of a million pounds’ worth of bookings each month,” he added.