How to start an online travel agency in 2026: step-by-step setup, licences and real costs

Step 1: Decide what you actually sell

Before anything else, pick your niche and your model. Selling flights carries the heaviest licensing and the thinnest margins; selling curated packages, tours and transfers carries lighter regulation and margins several times higher. Most successful new agencies start narrow — one destination, one traveller type, one product mix — and widen after the first hundred bookings.

Your model matters as much as your niche. B2C means marketing spend and low-value, high-volume transactions. B2B means fewer customers, larger baskets and a much longer sales cycle. Many agencies run both, with the B2C site funding the brand while B2B partners carry the volume.

Step 2: Register the business and get the licences right

Set up a limited company, open a business bank account and register for tax. Then work out which travel-specific obligations apply. In the UK, selling flights or flight-inclusive packages generally requires ATOL protection from the CAA; selling packages puts you under the Package Travel Regulations with insolvency protection obligations; ticketing airline stock in your own name requires IATA accreditation, which most new agencies skip in favour of a consolidator. Membership of ABTA or a similar body is optional but sells trust.

This is the step that decides your launch date. Applications, bonding and financial checks take weeks, not hours. Start them before you build anything.

Step 3: Get supplier content

You cannot sell what you cannot price. New agencies almost always begin with aggregated content — an NDC aggregator such as Duffel for flights, a bedbank such as Hotelbeds or TBO for hotels, and a tours or transfers aggregator — because these can be opened without volume commitments. Direct contracts with hotels, DMCs and airlines pay far better, but they expect a track record and often a deposit, so they come in year two.

Step 4: Launch the portal

This is the fast part and it is where new agencies waste the most money. A custom-built booking site costs tens of thousands and takes months; a white label travel portal is configured the same day. Claim a subdomain, apply your branding, switch on the products you sell, set your markup rules and connect your suppliers. Point your custom domain at it and you are trading.

Do not skip the back office. Whatever you use must produce invoices, e-tickets and vouchers in your name, keep a ledger your accountant can export, and let you amend and refund without emailing the vendor.

Step 5: Take money properly

Connect Stripe or PayPal to your own merchant account so settlement reaches your bank directly. Price in your customer's currency and set per-market markup rules — card fees plus cross-border charges routinely eat 3-4% and can exceed your net margin on a cheap flight. Decide your refund and chargeback policy before your first dispute, not during it.

Step 6: Get your first bookings

Your first ten bookings will come from people who already know you, not from Google. Work your network, join the local business community, and pick one channel to do properly — usually WhatsApp enquiries plus a small set of destination pages targeting the searches your niche actually makes. Content compounds; paid search does not.

What it really costs

Below is a realistic first-year budget for a lean UK online travel agency. Numbers vary by market and product mix, but the shape holds.

A realistic timeline

Company formation takes a day. Licensing and bonding take four to twelve weeks. Supplier accounts take one to three weeks each. The portal itself takes an afternoon. If you sequence them in parallel rather than in series, most agencies are trading within two months — and if you already hold your licences, you can be live on your own domain and taking bookings within 48 hours.