he announcement that the DNATA group is to close Travel Republic, hot on the heels of On the Beach’s closure of its “Dynamically Packaging” (DP) trade arm, makes it feel like the end of the era for independent DP in the UK.
Having 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 spent many enjoyable hours in Kingston pubs with Travel Republic’s founders, discussing strategy and exit options!
Unfortunately, On Holiday Groups’ VAT dispute with HMRC halted merger talks, and the guys became wealthy young men when selling out to DNATA on 28 December 2011, which now appears to be the business’s peak. At this point, they were serving more than 2 million customers annually and had seen their turnover rise by over 40% to more than £400 million in 2011, making them the clear OTA leader at that time.
Sensibly, DNATA tied the leadership of the business, Kane Pirie and Paul Furner, to the company through deferred payments for a further 3 years. However, the business never prospered the same way again, and like many acquisitions, as it lost its entrepreneurial drive and quick decision-making.
Only DNATA insiders will understand how, from these lofty heights, 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, after which Travel Republic removed Ryanair from sale for 4 years, from 2021 to May 2025.
Cheap seat access is vital for any DP engine. While competitors On the Beach and Love Holidays endeavoured to find workarounds to keep selling Ryanair during their openly declared war on UK OTAs, DNATA made the frankly arrogant decision that it did not need them. In my opinion, this move effectively destroyed Travel Republic as a competitive force.
I feel free to say this in hindsight, as I openly expressed it 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 Love’s and On the Beach’s flight seats, with both businesses booming again after the Ryanair trade reconciliation.
High EasyJet API fees, squeezing OTA profits, and reducing access to Jet2 seats through its in-house tour operations have made Ryanair access essential, and not doing so has strangled Travel Republic, forcing it to reposition itself as a Dubai- and long-haul-focused operation.
The COVID-19 Google Algorithm Reset.
OTAs in general survived COVID-19 much better than integrated tour operators like Tui, specifically because they had a much more flexible model with no plans sat on the ground and no guaranteed or owned hotels sitting empty.
However, COVID-19 disrupted the hierarchy of Google visibility that protected the top three players’ traffic 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 effectively blocks new entrants who have to fight their way to the top at great cost (a key reason why Low-Cost Holidays failed).
This created a relatively fixed and unchanging access to customers that existed before Covid-19, protecting relative volumes. However, the shutdown wiped out this history, turning it into a race among the major players to reestablish the pecking order once the bounce-back began.
As a privately held company, Love Holidays was able to be much more aggressive than On the Beach and Travel Republic, gaining a massive market-share boost post-COVID-19. This caused 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, 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 made in travel.
People are central to every travel business because the most successful ones consistently focus on customers and brands, taking great pride in the businesses they have built.
Every time things get tough, the corporate accountants start seeking cost savings by merging IT, finance, and customer services across the business, which destroys this focus.
With Travel Republic, DNATA immediately expanded its use of technology across other parts of its business, shifting attention away from its UK operations, and further damaged it by incorporating its hotel-buying team into group roles to help establish a corporate-wide bed bank called Yalago.
I am sure these seemed sensible corporate decisions at the time. Still, inevitably, they damaged the Travel Republic operation, and when combined with remote, disconnected discussions about Ryanair, they ultimately put the business into a downward spiral from which it has never recovered.
Summary
I know many clever and resilient people who have worked at Travel Republic and other DNATA-owned businesses over the years, and most have enjoyed working for this generous and considerate organisation.
However, I really don’t think Travel Republic marks the end of the Dynamic Packaging era; it’s simply a natural shift, caused by the currents of disruption that have hit the UK industry over the last 10 years. Smaller, more tightly managed businesses can react and change direction more quickly to survive these issues.
I clearly don’t know the full story here, but I hope my analysis, written at 4 am from the Dominican Republic, offers some insights and demonstrates how much I care about the topic.