Why We’re Building the General Intelligence for Travel
Scaling technology has been our superpower for 6 years. Today, it’s just table stakes.
We’ve built a platform capable of combining more than 15 trillion holiday possibilities each day — that’s 5.4 quadrillion offers a year. Enough grains of sand to cover the entire 7-mile stretch of Poole Bay in 30 centimetres of sand.
We don’t just create that beach — we also help each customer find their one perfect grain of sand. Millions of times a year.
It’s an extraordinary system — fast, flexible, and proven at scale.
And in true loveholidays style, it’s no longer enough.
The Inflection Point: Why Now?
We’re at a pivotal moment. 3 forces are colliding, each demanding fundamental change.
1. Our ambition has outgrown our capabilities.
Everything we originally built focused on one corner of the holiday market — short-haul holidays for UK customers. Our plans require a space 160 times larger. More destinations, more markets, more product types, more customer segments. Realistically, this expansion is something our tech, and our org, can’t support in its current shape.
2. AI is rewiring how businesses work.
Historically, the first wave of technology revolutions brought efficiency gains — we’re already seeing this. The second wave transforms entire industries. With AI, some believe it might eliminate whole categories — possibly including ours. When your industry faces potential disintermediation, evolution isn’t optional.
3. We’ve committed to a new customer vision: “Treat every holiday like it’s our own”.
This isn’t marketing. It’s an intentional shift in how we operate—from processing bookings to genuinely caring about each customer’s experience. Achieving this level of personal service whilst scaling is essential to our growth. We want customers choosing us not just for deals, but for how we treat them.
The challenge is huge, simultaneously addressing scale, AI disruption, and delivering an exceptional customer experience.
The question then becomes “How?”
How can we triple sales without tripling costs? Enter new markets and launch products faster? Serve customers better without breaking the bank?
The answer remains what it’s always been: we evolve.
Evolution has always been our answer to impossible challenges.
Evolution as a Survival Strategy
12 years ago, we started as travelmatch.com, a holiday comparison site. Packaging our own holidays was our first evolution — from aggregator to online travel agent (OTA). That pivot, and many more, turned us into the UK’s fastest-growing business.
Then scaling became the challenge. Our incoming CEO crystallised what we needed: to stop thinking like a travel company using technology and become a technology company in travel. This shift created foundations for truly unique capabilities in our industry. We built the fastest travel experience capable of offering a much wider range of holidays, accelerating us to the UK’s third-largest travel agent and the market leader in Ireland.
Now we need to change again. Being a technology company isn’t enough. We must embrace AI if we want to meet these 3 challenges.
This transformation is more ambitious than anything we’ve attempted. Technology transformations have playbooks — I’ve completed several and written up my learnings. But nobody has cracked this for AI. We’re writing the playbook whilst building it.
Our Vision: The General Intelligence for Travel
We’re building intelligence that works with language models, handles package travel’s complexities better than any system, and operates at an otherwise-impossible scale.
Breaking down those 3 words:
General means comprehensive — a unified system serving every team across our business, available to everyone.
Intelligence means AI integrated into every workflow, not bolted on — at our fingertips through an integrated platform.
Travel means deeply specialised — embedding 6 years of domain expertise that others can’t replicate. Our unique knowledge of package travel.
We’re creating travel intelligence that enhances rather than replaces human capability.
Why Only We Can Build This
AI is powerful, but only when it has context and can act. That’s where we excel.
We’ve always created new value from existing assets — selling holidays made from others’ hotels and flights, building our site on external tools and services. Sandy, our AI assistant, demonstrates this: built on Google’s models but powered by our domain expertise, acting within our systems.
To maximise AI’s potential, you need the right foundations — a lightning-fast, travel-shaped platform. AI capabilities are becoming commodities, like electricity. Everyone can access the power, but we’ve built the infrastructure to harness it. Whilst competitors lay foundations, we’re scaling production.
Consider AI-powered customer conversations: to respond at the speed of conversation, you need to search through trillions of options in under 150 milliseconds. People already hate slow websites—conversational delays are even worse.
Our infrastructure combines 3 essential elements:
Fast: Search and website performance rivalling Google.
Flexible: Supporting hundreds of thousands of system modifications yearly, mostly by AI or non-engineers.
Focused: Purpose-built for package travel with deep domain expertise embedded.
But technology alone isn’t enough. You need AI collaborating with the experts who built the platform, the commercial teams who use it, and the customer care specialists who serve holidaymakers.
By teaching our platform everything we know about package travel — our unique expertise — we create something genuinely new. Something that scales, resists disintermediation, and transforms travel experiences.
We alone have this combination.
What Travel Intelligence Will Deliver
This vision guides everything we’re building. 3 clear promises to 3 different stakeholders.
Better experiences for every customer
Our travel intelligence will interact through voice, chat, or image browsing. It will guide customers to perfect holidays with hyper-personalisation and support them throughout their journey — answering questions and solving problems in real time.
This delivers on our customer vision: treating every holiday like our own, at scale. Creating experiences customers return for.
More value for every partner
Travel intelligence will make us indispensable to suppliers and brands alike. Proactively offering suppliers volume where and when they need it most. Making their business smarter through multi-channel interaction with our unique data. Giving partners an instant package holiday business under their brand without risk.
This makes us the easiest partner to work with and the hardest to work without — the first choice for anyone partnering in travel.
Sustainable advantage every day
Travel intelligence will transform how we work. Every team’s operations become more efficient. Every job becomes more impactful. Together, this creates the lasting edge that keeps us ahead of competition and disintermediation.
Already Taking Steps
This isn’t just aspiration — we’ve already started taking steps.
We’re solving one of travel’s most complex problems — helping customers find the right hotel when faced with overwhelming choice.
Families of 4 now see kids’ club information highlighted automatically. Couples seeking adults-only escapes see poolside bars featured. The same hotel, personalised for different intents — powered by AI that understands context, applies our brand voice, and scales quality through self-assessment.
We’ve started with 300 hotels across four customer cohorts. The infrastructure we’re building will scale to every hotel, every cohort, every customer, every market.
Travel intelligence is also transforming internal operations. We’ve connected our data mesh directly to Claude through MCP, giving everyone access to 6 years of data through natural language. Teams now ask questions like “how do filters affect conversion by cohort?” and get instant dashboards with shareable links — in minutes rather than weeks.
The industry is taking notice. In the same week, I spoke at Sanity’s Everything conference in New York about building an AI-powered operating system to run our platform, whilst Content Manager Deborah Cameron gave a keynote at a Travel and Tourism Masterclass in London to senior industry leaders — sharing how we’re tackling hotel content challenges at scale.
The transformation is already under way.
Why This Matters Now
Our vision is our response to 3 challenges: ambition that’s outgrown our capabilities, AI disruption threatening our industry, and a customer vision that demands we treat every holiday like our own.
The General Intelligence for Travel is how we address all 3 simultaneously. It’s the infrastructure that lets us scale 160x without breaking. It’s the differentiation that turns AI from threat to advantage. It’s the platform that delivers exceptional service at impossible scale.
The travel industry is at an inflection point. AI will reshape how customers search, how they book, how suppliers distribute inventory, how companies operate.
Winning will require combining AI capabilities with deep domain expertise, performant infrastructure, and the organisational agility to transform whilst scaling.
We have that combination and the transformation is already underway.