Doesn’t a £20-per-person getaway to Malta sound delightful? What about five nights in Greece for two for £280pp?
These are just some of the bargain deals to be found on a website that’s being dubbed the ‘eBay of travel’.
Transfer Travel is an online marketplace for holiday bookings that allows you to buy and sell trips others can no longer – or don’t want to – go on.
It operates on an international scale with more than 162,000 users across over 170 countries, with the top three countries for user activity split across the US, UK and Canada.
Maisie Blewitt, head of commercial at Transfer Travel, tells the Daily Mail: ‘We’ve always said we’re like Vinted for travel or eBay for travel. If you can’t go on your holiday, you can just pop them on our platform and then resell them.
‘There’s well over a thousand listings on the website at the moment, well over a thousand different people who need to kind of recoup a bit of money or sell travel plans when things change.
Fancy a last-minute holiday on a budget? Transfer Travel could be your solution
The website demonstrates hot deals, standout holidays that may lure in keen bookers
‘A buyer from our community can bid and haggle down the price slightly, say if it’s nearing an expiry date and they want a better deal, or they can just buy it there and then as well.’
It’s free to sign up – and can see travellers make huge savings.
When a listing is purchased, the seller has 72 hours to complete the name change and transfer the documents confirming such name changes to the buyer.
The trip is then in the buyer’s name, ready for them to enjoy their trip at a discounted price.
Marketplace listings have increased by 185 per cent year-on-year, showing a significant rise in travellers choosing to resell holidays they can no longer use.
Over £7million worth of travel bookings has been listed on the Transfer Travel marketplace thus far for this year.
The average holiday across all categories is worth around £1,545, making resale an increasingly attractive way for consumers to recover money from unused trips while also offering buyers a meaningful saving.
‘Typically, we say you can see savings between about 40 to 70 percent, but within the past month, the typical saving was around 62 per cent,’ Maisie says.
‘If you only have one trip a year, travel is a luxury – so why would you not want to go on more, or make the most of the trips that you do have?’
Some breaks are really cheap, too – Maisie points out one Malta trip that cost £90, which the seller agreed to sell for £45 – divided by two people, this would be just over £20 each.
The downsides? The level of detail about the trip is down to the seller so, just as with purchases made on eBay or Vinted, you might not get the same level of information as you might if you were buying direct from a holiday company or rental site.
There’s also no functionality as yet for children, so a family would search for ‘four adults’.
The company also engages with the community by offering ‘hot deals’.
For example, efforts within social media, specifically TikTok Lives, allow Transfer Travel to highlight the top savings, provide exclusive discounts, show off never-before-seen listings and live reductions.
The site also does hot deals, last week featuring accommodation in Rhodes, at the Alia Beachfront suite and spa, for early September, selling for 50 per cent off. Two guests for five nights was discounted to £563, from £1,128.
A tool on the platform allows users to use a Google Flights API Integration to find cheap flights to complement their deal.
There are many successful examples of travellers using the site – including a couple from South Wales who were facing a £9,000 loss on a cruise they could no longer take, with no refund from the provider and their insurance not covering the situation.
Just six weeks before departure, one of them was advised not to travel following a heart-related health concern. The timing left little room to act, with no option to cancel for a refund, and the nature of the condition meant their insurance wouldn’t cover it, removing what is typically the main financial safety net for travellers.
Cruises are a popular second-hand holiday available on the website
With few options and the full cost at risk, the couple’s son, Owen Basset, 43, began looking for a way to salvage some of the money and sell the booking securely.
He said: ‘I was looking for a quick way to get something back. I assumed there must be somewhere you could move these bookings on.
‘You could probably try something like Facebook Marketplace, but I wouldn’t have been comfortable selling the trip privately because there’s too much that could go wrong.
‘When you’re dealing with large sums of money, you want a level of protection and reassurance that both sides will follow through.’
The cruise, which was departing from Lisbon, was listed for resale on Transfer Travel. With the departure date fast approaching, the listing needed to find a buyer and the transfer needed to be completed within the provider’s deadline.
Luckily, a buyer was secured just days before the final transfer deadline – Jorge Pavia.
Originally listed at around £9,000, the cruise sold for £3,000, allowing the couple to recover part of the cost that would have been lost entirely otherwise. The transfer was completed in time for the trip to go ahead under the new booking.
Owen said: ‘At that stage, we’d already assumed the money was gone, so getting anything back felt like a real win and it made a big difference.
‘Once everything was agreed with the buyer, the sale moved quickly and the whole process felt really safe and secure. There wasn’t that worry that it might fall through at the last minute.’
He added that while the situation was unexpected, it was one that others could easily find themselves in: ‘Travel resale is not something you expect to need, but I’d definitely suggest people look into it if they’re in a similar situation.’
Jorge Pavia snapped up the cruise for just £3,000 – a bargain purchase
They are not the only winners.
A mother from the US visiting the UK turned a spontaneous social media discovery into a first-class rail experience from London to Glasgow, securing return train tickets worth £240 for just £150 through a travel resale platform.
Kirsten Crocker, 38, had never heard of travel resale before coming across it in an Instagram Reel. At the time, she was already planning a UK trip with her two children, and was considering adding Scotland to her itinerary.
She said: ‘I’d never used or even heard of any of these platforms before. I saw an Instagram Reel from the influencer Mrs Dow Jones talking about how people resell trips they can’t use, and Transfer Travel was one of the sites she mentioned.
‘I went on to the site out of curiosity and immediately saw the train tickets. I travel to Manchester quite often, and I’d been thinking about going to Scotland as well. It just felt like perfect timing.’
The listing was for two return first-class train tickets from London Euston to Glasgow Central in March. Originally priced at £240, Kirsten submitted an offer of £150, which was accepted straight away.
‘It was quite impulsive,’ she said. ‘I saw the tickets and just decided to go for it, it just felt like a great deal.’
As travel costs continue to rise and more travellers look for ways to make their budgets go further, resale is emerging as not just a fallback when plans change, but as a way to access experiences that might otherwise feel out of reach.
Even train travel – which is notoriously expensive in the UK – is available to buy
Transfer Travel’s research shows that while awareness of resale platforms is still relatively low, interest is growing, particularly among travellers open to flexible, last-minute opportunities.
Travel expert Laura Carden-Lovell from Transfer Travel says this case highlights the evolving role of resale in travel planning: ‘Stories like this show how resale isn’t just a safety net, it’s becoming a discovery tool for travellers. People aren’t always starting with a fixed plan; sometimes they come across an opportunity and build a trip around it.
‘In this case, a first-class rail journey that might have felt like a luxury became an accessible, spontaneous addition to a family trip. That’s where resale is really adding value – giving people the flexibility to do more with their travel, often at a reduced cost.’
For Kirsten, what started as a casual scroll quickly turned into a memorable family experience and a first-class journey she may not have booked otherwise.
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