The shape of the business.

Halford & Hart is a premium-only online travel agency, headquartered in Manchester, with our first full year of trading completing in 2026. We list four-star and five-star hotels exclusively, with a hybrid Merchant of Record commercial structure that lets us hold inventory pricing and own the customer relationship end to end.

Inventory is sourced from Amadeus Self-Service for the long tail (~1.5 million properties post-filter) and supplemented by direct contracts with thirty marquee anchor hotels — Maybourne, Soho House, Aman, Belmond, Dorchester Collection, Iconic Luxury Hotels, plus a curated set of independents.

The company has been profitable on a unit-economics basis since month four. A small seed round closed at the end of 2024; we are not actively raising at present, but we do answer letters from investors who've read the model carefully.

We started Aurora because the existing OTA experience felt structurally misaligned with how serious travellers — and serious hotels — actually want to do business. Booking.com sells everything to everyone; the loyalty programmes are points farms; premium properties are listed alongside roadside motels with the same iconography and the same review math.

The bet is that there is a meaningful, durable customer base for an OTA that says no to most inventory on principle, hires editorial discipline as a core function, and treats its anchor hotels as partners rather than wholesale sources.

The technical bet is that the supplier-abstraction layer we've built — every booking routed through a single adapter interface, with the direct-contract route preferred over the wholesale route at the engine level — is the structural advantage that holds the brand promise as we scale. It's the kind of architectural decision that is easy to skip and fatal in year three.

— Adnan Billal, Founder & CEO