All About Us

Our company began life in 1999 as missmarple.co.uk. Originally a university bedroom project of one of the founders, missmarple.co.uk was a very simple web site that enabled users to search for hotels in and around the UK and browse images and descriptions of each hotel.

The ability to make bookings was added via a “booking request form” that sent through the users requirements to a back-office team (students in the very beginning!) where availability and prices were checked directly with the hotel and typically over the phone.

As site volume began to grow, we received a growing number of enquiries from business travellers and one day a company phoned up to see if we could look after all of their hotel bookings. On the back of this enquiry the company evolved into a corporate hotel booking specialist.

In 2003 missmarple.co.uk started doing some work for a major UK retailer. The retailer had high street shops across the country and needed their staff booking into the room above the high-street pub, rather than the expensive Hilton that was 3 miles out of town. Word spread of our flexibility compared to their incumbent “big TMC” and soon we were officially awarded their entire hotel accommodation contract.

The following year that same major retailer asked us if we could replicate the flexibility we delivered in hotel booking for their air and train bookings. At the time the big TMC’s lacked support for the low-cost carriers such as Easyjet which were critical suppliers for any pan-european business looking to cut costs. So we assembled and rolled-out a full-service travel offering and were rewarded with the major retailer's full UK travel contract.

Then the penny dropped: what if we could build a system that enabled us to replicate the flexibility that our customers loved via an online service ? What if we could build a system that brought all the content together into a single set of search results and a uniform booking process, wrapped in the controls that corporates need to control their travel purchasing (such as policy compliance, centralised billing, reporting)?

Out of this vision Click Travel was born and launched in early 2008. Within 12 months of going live, Missmarple (which had virtually no online booking what-so-ever) became Click Travel with over 90% of all bookings completed online. It was a dramatic step forward for the travel management industry, let alone our company.

Between 2008 and 2010 we refined and improved our travel platform, along the way winning the Best Business Travel Management Company award in 2009. In January 2011 we launched Travel Manager 2 - a major upgrade to our online services and packed full of new features.

Also in 2011 we opened a new chapter in our company history with the launch of OpenRail. OpenRail is our very own rail platform. It's one of just a handful of systems that are officially approved to sell rail tickets and we're really excited about it. OpenRail also triggered takethetrain.co.uk - a public train ticket retailing web site, and our first venture into the consumer world.