Travel tech firm targets Polish and UK online holiday markets

Click&Go offers travel packages in markets including family holidays and cruising. Stock image

Donal O'Donovan

Dublin-based travel technology company Click&Go is to open a Polish office as it looks to bring its offering to the UK and other European countries.

"We're looking to replicate our business model in Poland," said Paul Hackett, CEO and co-founder of the online company which offers travel packages in markets including family holidays and cruising.

"It has a population of 10 times that of Ireland, similar holiday patterns, good propensity to buy online, great route network to all the key holiday destinations and reasonably low levels of competition in the online travel company/dynamic packaging space. Once we crack Poland we'll look at other European expansion ahead of looking at the UK market."

The company, founded seven years ago during the recession, employs more than 50 people from 12 different countries.

Turnover for 2017 will be around €40m, and the company has doubled in size from 2014 to 2016 in terms of turnover and passenger numbers.

Click&Go has appeared on the Enterprise Ireland HPSU list since 2012.

A year later INM bought 30pc of the business and just last year saw Click&Go ranked 15th on the Deloitte Fast 50 technology companies listing.

"We're a home-grown, Irish success story competing with some of the huge major multi-nationals like Expedia, Travel Republic and Booking.com and we are now growing our share of the online travel business in Ireland," Mr Hackett said.

"Travelsmart technology that we invested in gave us amazing insights into website user behaviour and let us target our customers more intelligently.

"I appreciate how savvy today's customers are - they understandably want value for money and they want to see what the cost of their well-earned holiday is going to be, almost instantly, without going through swings and roundabouts."