Loveholidays Sold £3.4 Billion of Holidays on an Old Idea

Loveholidays sold £3.4 billion ($4.5 billion) of package holidays in the year to October 2025 — roughly 2.7 times the transaction value of its closest listed rival, On the Beach — by scaling a model that has existed since the early days of online travel. The privately held British company combines third-party flights and hotels dynamically at the moment a customer searches. It didn't invent dynamic packaging. It out-scaled everyone else using it.

What do the filings show?

Revenue rose 25% last year to £344.5 million ($456 million), and adjusted EBITDA rose 39% to £112.7 million ($149 million), according to Companies House filings. The adjusted EBITDA margin climbed from 29% to 33%. Crucially, profit grew faster than volume. Bookings rose 15% and transaction value rose 17% — both well behind the 25% revenue growth. In plain words: the company is getting more efficient, not just bigger.

Where is the growth coming from?

Repeat customers carried the load. About 55% of bookings came from returning customers, and roughly a third came through an app with more than six million downloads. Marketing tells a similar story of leverage. Spend rose in absolute terms to £143 million ($189 million), but fell as a share of revenue from about 45% to 42%. That's real money — three percentage points of a £344.5 million revenue base, or roughly £10 million a year redirected from paid acquisition.

How does the rival comparison stack up?

On the Beach, founded eight years earlier and public since 2015, reports nearly identical margins at about a third of the scale — £1.25 billion ($1.66 billion) of transaction value. Loveholidays is now roughly 2.8 times larger by revenue and adjusted EBITDA. Identical margins at vastly different scale suggests the model's economics aren't purely a function of size — a caveat to any claim that scale alone explains the margin.

What's under the hood?

The filings also show £16.6 million ($22 million) of supplier rebates tied to tourist board and hotel incentives and virtual-card payment volumes, plus £12.1 million ($16 million) of technology investment. Supplier rebates that large are worth watching: they tie revenue to hotel and destination incentives, which can shift with market conditions rather than customer demand.

The company launched in 2012, eight years after On the Beach. The open question — one the filings don't answer — is whether the model travels: the big test ahead is whether Loveholidays can replicate its British scale across Europe, where buying flights and hotels together is less habitual.