A Liverpool-based TravelTech startup has marked its third birthday by breaking £1m annual revenue.
Digital Travel Marketing Group provides digital travel solutions to travel and tourism businesses, with a particular focus on cruises.
Founded by Peter Whittle and Peter Aland during the Covid pandemic, the company has bootstrapped its growth from a team of five to employing 14 people with 67 clients, 59 per cent of which are overseas.
Clients include Hays Travel, Imagine Cruising and Flight Centre.
Annual revenue has increased from £250k in year one; £600k in year two; to £1m in year three.
To accommodate its burgeoning team, the company has also doubled its office space within the city’s Cotton Exchange.
Digital Travel Marketing Group 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.
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.”
Digital Travel Marketing Group now has an international customer base across the EU, Americas and APAC regions and boasts a 98 per cent client retention rate, supported by a strategic partnership with globally renowned travel technology provider, Traveltek.
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 the startup 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.
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