Start-up holiday destination search engine inspiremyholiday.com has ramped up its commercial team in expectation of a surge of business once the COVID-19 travel restrictions ease. The privately funded business recently has added Tom Dale and Lockie Kerr as business development consultants with the aim of signing new partners following a strong initial six months in operation.

The company – which already works with big-name brands including Lastminute.com, One&Only Resorts, booking.com, CV Villas, Expedia and New Market Holidays – is targeting 350,000 unique visitors in the next 12 months and has spent the lockdown period fine-tuning the bespoke search technology on its site.

Oliver Lomas, director and founder at inspiremyholiday.com said: “While the whole travel industry has endured an incredibly difficult few months, there is no doubt that there will be a huge pent-up demand for holidays in the months to come.

“Every holiday business should be looking at the way it acquires new customers, and that is where slick players such as inspiremyholiday.com can help, whatever your budget is. We target consumers who are undecided on their destination and using a simple and effective search engine we enable the consumer to qualify themselves and link off to our partners driving truly incremental sales to our partners,” he added.

Lomas added that he had faith in further investment after the business conducted a poll of over 3,000 UK consumers to discover their future holiday intentions. While the domestic market came out on top (17%), the majority of Brits said they would head to European destinations (47%). Top choices were Spain (9%), Italy (8.3%), Greece (5.3%) and France (3.3%).