Directline-Holidays was a trading name of Holidayline (UK) Ltd until the brand and website was sold to Broadway Travel in September 2013. It specialises in selling cheap

package holiday A package tour, package vacation, or package holiday comprises transport and accommodation advertised and sold together by a vendor known as a tour operator. Other services may be provided such as a rental car, activities or outings during the ho ...

s, flights and hotels. An independent and privately owned UK travel agent, it has been an early adopter and advocate of new media. Launched in 1993, directline holidays was among a handful of holiday companies advertising on

television Television, sometimes shortened to TV, is a telecommunication medium for transmitting moving images and sound. The term can refer to a television set, or the medium of television transmission. Television is a mass medium for advertisin ...

text services. In 2000 its first website directlineholidays.com was launched, advertising with bid-for-position search engine pioneers espotting (now miva) and goto (now

Yahoo! Search Marketing Yahoo! Native (formerly known as Yahoo! Advertising, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Yahoo! Gemini) is a native "Pay per click" Internet advertising service provided by Yahoo. Yahoo began offering this service after acquiring Overture Services, Inc. ...

). In 2001 the entirety of the company's marketing budget was spent with online bid-for-position companies, including the newly created Google Adwords. By 2003 the company changed its website address to directline-holidays.co.uk and was already advertising with every major PPC (

pay per click Pay-per-click (PPC) is an internet advertising model used to drive traffic to websites, in which an advertiser pays a publisher (typically a search engine, website owner, or a network of websites) when the ad is clicked. Pay-per-click is usually ...

) network including

adwords Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords) is an online advertising platform developed by Google, where advertisers bid to display brief advertisements, service offerings, product listings, or videos to web users. It can place ads both in the result ...

and Overture (now

). directline-holidays.co.uk continued its early adoption of new media through 2006, trialing pay-per-call advertising with Google adwords and beta testing

Microsoft adCenter Microsoft Advertising (formerly Bing Ads, Microsoft adCenter and MSN adCenter) is a service that provides pay per click advertising on the Bing, Yahoo!, and DuckDuckGo search engines. In 2021, Microsoft Advertising surpassed US$10 billion in annual ...

in the UK. Although, well known in the UK online community for many years, geographic targeting has left the company virtually unknown outside of the UK.

External links

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ATOL - Air Travel Organisers' LicensingMSO.net: Web site and technology suppliers to Directline Holidays
{{Tourism in the United Kingdom Hotel and leisure companies of the United Kingdom Travel and holiday companies of the United Kingdom Online companies of the United Kingdom Online travel agencies