Since the launch of “We Love Holidays” in 2012 by Alex Francis and Jonny Marsh, the company has adeptly navigated the industry, attracting a panel of industry luminaries as early-stage investors to enhance their credibility with Meridian Corporate Finance, which provided the initial £2m expansion capital.
They invested this money in developing the best “Caching” solution in the travel sector, which enabled them to take live API feeds from bed banks and build databases of prices that could be easily combined with similar flight “caches” to generate billions of holiday options.
This may seem simple, but developing algorithms to determine how often prices should be updated based on factors like time before departure, party type, or duration is complex. These algorithms are vital for minimising any price jumps customers notice when shifting from cached pricing, which might be outdated, to live prices required for booking.
Caching prices enabled Love to both speed up its results presentation and introduce innovations such as the “Month” view on hotel landing pages, where customers could see all the prices by date of arrival at the hotel, including flight costs. These allow them to choose the cheapest travel options if their dates are flexible.
However, it was not until Living Bridge bought the business for £190m in 2018 that the company had the capital needed to expand from 140 to 750 staff and implement a highly aggressive Google PPC bidding strategy that saw them reach the top spot on most travel search terms.
Like most travel businesses, Love was devastated by Covid-19 and suffered significant losses. However, its recovery from Covid has been remarkably impressive, with passenger numbers reaching 5 million and profits of £67.6m in 2024, twice that of their closest competitor, On the Beach, whom they have blown out of the water in terms of growth rate.
Few Venture Capital firms are willing to hold their investments longer than five years, and even with the disruption caused by COVID-19, Living Bridges’ exit is now long overdue. Having failed to find a trade buyer or VC investor, Love’s owners appointed Rothschild in July 2025 to facilitate an IPO that values the business at an eye-watering £1 billion in the first quarter of 2026.
In many ways, Love’s IPO timing is ideal.
Previously, there had been serious doubts about their long-term access to low-cost flight seats as Jet2 and Easyjet continued to expand their own tour operations and impose API fees of at least £24 per booking, damaging either the ability to offer competitive pricing or profits of OTAs. At the same time, Ryanair was actively hostile, trying to block access to their seats and calling OTAs like Love “Pirates” that were “Conning” customers and marking up Ryanair flights above their actual cost.
However, in January 2024, Rynair did a complete “U-turn”, with Love becoming the first Ryanair-approved package holiday provider, with access to all Ryanair flights with a Zero API fee, and it is now believed that Ryanair flights power over 50% of the holidays sold by Love.
This guaranteed seat access, combined with a large surplus of UK departing flight seats in Summer 2025, will have boosted turnover and profit substantially, and I expect record-breaking financial results for the year ended 2025.
But has Love reached the crest of their growth wave?
Investors closely analysing Love’s results will be worried by the 30% decline in the cost-efficiency of Google advertising, a key issue in most OTA board rooms. This decline is primarily attributed to the shift towards AI search engines, particularly Google’s introduction of Gemini AI answers at the top of search results.
Put simply, customers are finding their desired answers more quickly and with fewer clicks, significantly reducing the traffic available to OTAs, while the cost of these clicks has risen as OTAs compete for them.
Unlike On the Beach, Love has historically focused on driving traffic through Google or profit share deals with the social media giant “Travel Pirates,” rather than investing in above-the-line brand awareness campaigns.
Just as the advent of the internet destroyed the vertically integrated tour operators’ grip over high street distribution, the advent of AI Search could destroy Love’s stronghold over top “pay per click” (PPC) positions as the market evolves away from a PPC model, reducing its access to customers.
Many commentators argue that new AI agentic tools will enable DIY holidaymakers to bypass the OTA intermediaries and connect directly with asset owners, such as airline and hotel websites, to fulfil their holiday needs without the OTA markup, relying on credit card protection instead of ATOL cover in case anything goes wrong.
However, I believe Love could present a convincing counterargument that their “Caching” systems make them the ideal partners for AI Search engines seeking to help customers find the best prices for a holiday in Majorca, because they can offer their month view tools that show exactly this.
It is simply too early to predict exactly how AI search will affect Love and other UK OTAs, but I must admit that my doubts mean I will not be investing at a £1 billion valuation, as I believe Love may already have reached the peak of their valuation.
However, this is only my guess. What’s your view?