On the Beach Brand Guidelines: A 2004 Macclesfield Start, a 2015 Float & an Ancoats HQ

A student ski business, then a beach one.

On the Beach is the trading name of On the Beach Group plc, an online seller of package holidays based in Manchester. Its founder, Simon Cooper, started in travel while still at university. English Wikipedia says he set up a ski holiday company called On the Piste, which took groups of students by coach to the French Alps on budget ski trips. In 2004 he began a second business, On the Beach; the company says it was started from a terraced house in Macclesfield. When Thomson Holidays, part of TUI and since renamed TUI UK, bought On the Piste in 2008, Cooper turned his full attention to the beach business, English Wikipedia says.

The young company sold flights, hotel rooms and beach holidays in Europe, North Africa, the Caribbean and Central America, along with foreign currency, insurance and car hire, according to a Manchester Evening News report on its first private equity deal. That report said On the Beach then employed around 70 people across premises in Didsbury and Macclesfield, and quoted Cooper as saying the company had grown to more than 200,000 passengers “from a standing start.” The paper named the investor as ISIS Equity Partners; English Wikipedia names it as Livingbridge and dates its majority stake to 2007. In 2008 the business moved to larger premises at Towers Business Park in Didsbury.

Over the next few years the company added services around the core package. English Wikipedia says it bought a resort taxi firm out of administration in 2011 and renamed it On the Beach Transfers in 2012; set up On the Beach Beds in 2011 to contract directly with hotels; launched a 24-hour in-resort support service in January 2012; and moved its head office to Cheadle, near Stockport, by the end of 2012.

Private equity, a float and a former aircraft factory.

Ownership changed again in October 2013, when Livingbridge sold a majority stake to Inflexion, according to English Wikipedia. In January 2015 the company tried its model abroad, launching in Sweden under a separate web address, and in September 2015 On the Beach floated on the London Stock Exchange. In May 2017 it bought the rival online travel agent Sunshine.co.uk, English Wikipedia says.

Television arrived late in the company’s story. English Wikipedia says On the Beach aired its first TV advert on 26 December 2013, a campaign called “Totally Beachin’ Holidays” filmed in Corralejo on Fuerteventura and broadcast in the Midlands on ITV and Channel 4.

The company’s offices became part of its image. In November 2018, the Manchester Evening News reported, On the Beach opened a new digital headquarters in the Aeroworks building in Ancoats, a former aircraft components factory in central Manchester, after what the paper called a multi-million-pound design and refit. The paper described a beach-themed, campus-style office with a 250-seat auditorium, a games room and a beach bar, beach-themed lounges, a user-experience testing lab and team pods for developers. Most of the business moved there, while the contact centre stayed at the previous head office at Park Square in Cheadle. At the time, the paper noted, On the Beach was a member of the FTSE 250 index.

The founder handed over day-to-day leadership in 2023. Travel Gossip reported in May 2023 that Cooper was presenting his last half-year results as chief executive, and that chief financial officer Shaun Morton would take over on 30 June 2023, with Cooper moving to the role of Founder Director.

Brochures, shop windows and booking pages.

Package-holiday operators and travel agencies sell something the customer cannot see before the trip, so the brand has to stand in for the holiday. In the shop era that meant printed brochures and the windows of high-street shops, filled with resort photographs and destination names. Online agencies moved the same job to booking pages, where search boxes, hotel photographs and a single package price do the work the brochure once did.

Television has been a second shop window. On the Beach aired its first TV advert in December 2013, a campaign filmed on Fuerteventura, according to English Wikipedia; loveholidays’ chief executive told City A.M. in 2024 that his company did not spend on TV advertising and leaned on social media and brand partnerships instead. Both approaches show the holiday rather than the company: sea, sand, pools and city streets.

Naming in the sector tends to be plain. Some brands describe the product or the destination, some carry a founder’s surname, and some are built to read as a web address. Holiday ranges and sub-brands are usually named for the kind of trip they sell, such as beach, city break, long haul or cruise, so a customer can tell them apart at a glance.

Corporate pages tell a different story from the booking pages: who founded the company and where, which investors have owned it, when it listed or was sold, and, for some firms in this set, when the business collapsed or was absorbed into another group. This guide sets out what dated sources record about each brand, and marks what rests only on the company’s own word.

A name that says where the customer is going.

The name has stayed literal while the range has widened. The company now says it has moved from mainly short-haul, three-star beach destinations to long-haul and premium beach holidays, city breaks and cruises. Its full-year results for the twelve months to 30 September 2025, reported by Travel Gossip and the Northern Financial Review on 2 December 2025, set out the shape of that change. Morton said the company had sent a record 1.7 million customers on beach holidays and city breaks in the year, and four- and five-star holidays made up more than 80% of the value of its sales, Travel Gossip reported.

The same results recorded a narrowing of the business. In October 2025 the group closed its business-to-business operation, which traded as Classic Collection, to concentrate on selling directly to holidaymakers; Morton said that was where the company saw the strongest potential. He also pointed to city breaks and holidays for customers in the Republic of Ireland as newer parts of the mix, and to the recent launch of cruise holidays.

The company describes its own model in terms similar to other online package sellers: it says it has “no fixed ties to airlines or hotels” and that its customers are ATOL-protected. Those are the company’s statements. The documented outline is a founder-led start in Cheshire, two rounds of private equity ownership, a London listing in 2015 and a move from suburban offices to a converted factory in the city centre.

For a design guide, On the Beach shows how a plain, descriptive name can carry a brand from a single product into city breaks and cruises. Compare loveholidays, a younger online package seller that Livingbridge also backed, and easyJet, whose flights sit inside many such packages. For this guide we use deep sea blue, lagoon and sand with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep On the Beach’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.