North West-based technology start-up based in the heart of Liverpool, digitaltravel.io is celebrating its third birthday with the news it has quadrupled in size financially since its inception.
The company, which provides digital travel solutions to travel and tourism businesses, with a particular focus on cruise, hit over £1m annual revenue in its third year, up from £250k in its first 12 months of operation.
The company’s increase in annual sales is one of several milestones digitaltravel.io is marking in 2024. Founded by Peter Whittle and Peter Aland during the second year of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2021, digitaltravel.io has bootstrapped its growth from a team of five to employing 14 people with 67 clients, 59% of which are overseas. To accommodate its burgeoning team, the company has also doubled its office space within the city’s Cotton Exchange.
digitaltravel.io was established through the merger of Peter Whittle’s CruiseAppy, a mobile app platform for the cruise industry and Peter Aland’s iprogress, a web design and development agency.
Their innovation has been to create a scalable integrated bespoke app and website platform with unique customer engagement features powered by world class travel data and content that have proved game-changing and become the choice for a growing number of cruise and travel agents worldwide.
CEO and co-founder Peter Whittle said:
“We saw a gap in the market and established digitaltravel.io to build a business that not only stands out for the quality of what it achieves, but for the way in which it innovates and builds long standing relationships with its clients. Three years on, because of a talented team, loyal clients and strong partnerships, we have exceeded our expectations. As a start-up we have reached ‘base camp’ and are now investing in people and processes to help grow the business still further along with the scalability of our platform.”
digitaltravel.io now has an international customer base across the EU, Americas and APAC regions and boasts a 98% client retention rate, supported by a strategic partnership with globally renowned travel technology provider, Traveltek. Among its clients are some of the biggest brands in the sector: Hays Travel, Imagine Cruising and Flight Centre.
Peter Whittle added: “We’ve fuelled our £1m in annual revenue by creating long-term partnerships with many of our clients by agreeing ongoing monthly contracts for not only support and maintenance, but guaranteed development resource to provide a mutually beneficial partnership of response, focus, resource and delivery for our clients while giving us the confidence to invest further with guaranteed revenue streams. Our growth has been underpinned by key staff appointments and a series of innovative strategies that have made a huge difference in the marketplace.”
In 2021 digitaltravel.io was recognised at the industry-leading Travolution awards in the Best Technology Provider category, and in 2023 and 2024, the company was named in the Tech Climbers list of top scalable, innovative and product-led technology businesses across Liverpool City Region.
Mal Barritt, Chief Executive of Traveltek said:
“We have an excellent and mutually beneficial working relationship with digitaltravel.io. Their unwavering commitment and can-do attitude has helped to deliver numerous websites worldwide for Traveltek clients combining our tech knowhow and travel industry expertise to help travel agents deliver the best they can for their customers online.”
James Robathan, head of digital of Imagine Cruising, added: “digitaltravel.io successfully migrated all of our websites globally to a new content management system and infrastructure allowing us to create and build bespoke products quickly and efficiently for different countries. Their technology has made us more efficient and helped us expand into new markets, while their tenacity and innovation has enabled them to outpace their competitors and gain recognition in a very competitive industry.”
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