Dnata's decision to shutter its UK online travel agency (OTA) Travel Republic came hot on the heels of On the Beach's closure of its dynamically packaged (DP) trade arm Classic Collection.

When I wrote a blog about it all, saying it felt like the end of an era for independent DP in the UK, people misinterpreted it as an indication I thought DP was history. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I've been deeply involved in the DP sector since its inception. I was a founder of the On Holiday Group alongside partners Bill Allen (On the Beach) and Brian Young (G Adventures).

And having monitored the market carefully for years, it is clear the first DP boom effectively ended with the outbreak of Covid-19. However, I am predicting a second smaller DP boom off the back of a newly trade-friendly Ryanair and new agentic AI tools.

Seat supply and Ryanair

The significant disruption caused by Covid-19 and Ryanair's controversial behaviour towards OTAs and agents saw many businesses either refuse to sell Ryanair – or find themselves barred from selling their flights owing to the airline's increasingly aggressive anti-agent stance, which peaked late in 2023.

This approach was so effective that it started harming Ryanair’s load factor and yields, alerting them – perhaps for the first time – to the sheer number of seats being dynamically packaged by OTAs and travel agents.

Unsurprisingly, given Ryanair is usually the cheapest airline on most the routes it operates, its anti-agent stance severely depressed DP volumes.

However, January 2024 brought a major strategic shift as Ryanair introduced an “Approved OTA” status, signing distribution agreements with Loveholidays and On the Beach, among others – most notably Tui.

This deal, combined with Google's algorithm reset post Covid-19, was a major factor in Loveholidays' impressive growth in passenger numbers from 2.8 million in 2023 to five million in 2025, with Ryanair providing more than 50% of seats sold.

And unlike some tour operator, Ryanair provides agents with access to its seats without API feeds, making them more than £50 cheaper per couple, on average. Ryanair provides the lifeblood of cheap seats that could fuel a second DP boom.

AI dynamic packaging tools

I have just invested in a business offering an AI tool called “Any Better”, which allows customers and agents to compare prices for holidays between any of the top five Atol holders and DP offers on the same basis – including baggage and transfers.

This uses agentic AI to script into the various websites to check prices and then to script through the booking process using a customer profile with their names, address and baggage and transfer preferences, reducing booking times to minutes.

(Credit: iStock / Mrkit99)

It will also mean DP options are automatically offered, when price competitive, against the simpler option of just booking the commissionable offerings from easyJet holidays, Jet2holidays and Tui.

Agentic AI is a very robust solution as it reads sites like a human and can easily adjust to any changes made to the sites whereas historic "screen scraping" technology required high levels of maintenance. I expect a large number of travel technology business to be offering platforms powered by this new technology in the coming 18 months.

Why DP when you can just sell Jet2 or easyJet?

Primarily, it comes down to commission, and the rates operators offer agents seeking price parity with online pricing, although they can mark up from this baseline to boost earnings.

These in-house tour operators don’t have to pay API fees, which often makes them cheaper than the prices offered by DP platforms powered by these APIs – such as Classic collection before it was closed – boosting their competitiveness on price compared with DP options.

Their parent airlines also dump discounted seats into packages as this offers them an opaque way of shifting seats while keeping seat only prices increasing closer to departure to encourage early booking. Again, this often means DP platforms cannot compete with these prices.

However, switch-selling to a Ryanair flight and hotel provided by a bed bank can often offer agents much higher margins.

The Atol risk

The massive disruption caused by Covid-19 highlighted the risk being the "principal" who is responsible for replacing any cancelled flights.

Many agents simply do not want to carry this risk, hence the creation of Classic Collection's DP platform that allowed them to package under somebody else’s Atol removing this risk.

(Credit: ITT / Arif Gardner)

However, this came at a relatively high price, and larger travel agency businesses like Hays Hays and Travel Counsellors are happy to take this risk centrally allowing their agents and homeworkers to use in-house DP platforms.

Given the current stability of the European airline market, I personally think the risk of DP is low and the higher margins available make it an obvious addition to any agent's product offering.

What's the upshot?

I'm therefore predicting there will be a second, smaller DP boom powered by a trade-friendly Ryanair and AI tools that make it much easier to compare prices and increase margins without increasing the booking hassle.

On many most occasions, agents will not be able to beat the prices offered by easyJet holidays' and Jet2holidays' tour operations, which use their parent airlines seats.

So realistically, DP will mainly revolve around switch-selling to Ryanair, which comes with its own customer service issues, as we all know.

DP is certainly not a no-brainer, but in my opinion, the higher margins are worth the risk.

Steve Endacott is a former MyTravel executive, who went on to found Holiday Taxis Group and Rock Insurance. He is now chair of the AI incubator Neural River.