Click&Go Holidays has appointed Peter Cullen as chief executive, in an announcement made on 2 September 2026. The Irish online travel company framed the change as the start of a new phase of growth and development.
Cullen is an internal promotion with an unusually long runway behind it. He first worked with the company as a consultant before joining full time in 2015, and has since held a series of senior roles spanning commercial strategy, marketing, digital and operations. He was most recently chief operating officer.
That progression matters more than it might in a larger business. In an online travel agency the commercial, marketing, digital and operations functions are not separable, because the booking engine is the shop, the marketing spend is the footfall and the operations team is the product. An executive who has run all four in sequence arrives with a view of the whole chain rather than one link in it.
As chief executive, Cullen will lead the overall business with a stated focus on continued growth, innovation, technology and customer experience.
The handover is an orderly one and it is not a departure. Co-founder Paul Hackett moves to a new role at the company, where he will concentrate on the cruise holidays business, on developing the international division, and on strengthening communications and brand visibility. That is a deliberate split of a founder chief executive role into two: the operating leadership of the core business on one side, and the growth bets plus the public face of the brand on the other.
The structure is a recognisable one for founder led travel businesses that have outgrown a single leader. Cruise and international expansion are both distribution problems rather than incremental volume, and both tend to demand the founder relationships and market credibility that are hard to delegate. Handing the day to day operating business to a long serving internal executive frees the founder to work on exactly those, without the discontinuity of an external hire learning the company from scratch.
Click&Go Holidays is one of the larger online travel agencies in Ireland. The Irish outbound leisure market has spent the period since the pandemic reshaping around direct online booking, dynamic packaging and a smaller number of scaled operators, which puts a premium on the technology and customer experience agenda Cullen has been given.
For the company, the test of the appointment will be whether the split holds. Founder transitions that keep the founder inside the business succeed or fail on how cleanly the two remits are drawn, and this one has been drawn with more specificity than most.
