Graham Donoghue is the guitar-playing beekeeper at the top of one of the UK’s biggest names in holidays – yet you probably haven’t heard of him. In an industry dominated by heavyweights such as Airbnb and Booking.com, the Chester-headquartered Forge Holiday Group has established itself as a big player which takes 3.5 million people on holiday every year.

The short-stay specialist provider owns a range of brands, most notably Sykes Cottages but also Forest Holidays, UKCaravans4Hire and New Zealand’s leading holiday home business Bachcare. The company manages 33,000 properties, handles 700,000 annual bookings, has 1,800 staff and transacts more than £500m a year.

Forge Holiday Group might not be the first name on most people’s list of potential unicorns, but it is widely thought to be on the cusp of achieving the $1bn valuation. Donoghue, the man tasked with overseeing that journey, is a self-confessed data nerd and part-time beekeeper who loves tech, evidenced by the fact that he wears a Garmin Fenix 6x watch to monitor everything from his daily step count, calories burnt and sleep statistics.

He also has an Aktiia blood pressure monitor and a Whoop band health tracker on his wrist to measure stress levels, skin temperature and heart rate variability. Donoghue likes to know what’s going on “under the bonnet” of his health and he takes the same approach with business.

One of the centrepieces of the Chester office is a giant real-time data wall; the chief executive wants his entire workforce to be aware of the company’s performance. The information includes everything from the company’s Net Promoter Score, to call wait times, when and how people book, and holiday hotspots.

“It’s about visibility and making sure the whole organisation knows what’s going on and remembers that we’re taking millions of people on holiday,” says Donoghue. “One key trend is that people are booking later. At some times in the year, you can get 40 per cent of your bookings within four weeks of departure. We have people book today to leave tomorrow and the next day. The other thing we’re seeing is the length of stay is narrowing. Plus, the proportion of bookings from people with dogs has gone up to around 40 per cent.”

Donoghue became chief executive of Sykes Cottages in 2016, having previously held senior roles at MoneySuperMarket Group and Tui. When Forge Holiday Group was formed in 2023 after acquiring Sykes, Forest Holidays and other brands, he was the obvious choice to fill the seat.

It has been an eventful journey. In 2019, Vitruvian Partners took a majority stake in the business for a reputed £400m. A year later, Covid sent the travel industry into a tailspin, but staycations soared, with 82 per cent of Brits holidaying at home in 2022. Forge Holiday Group was able to take advantage of the fact that it has largely built its own technology, but Donoghue says there’s zero room for complacency.

To illustrate the point, opposite the data wall is a display of 40 mobile handsets from across the ages, including a version of the first mobile phone that originally cost more than £7,000 and had its own power pack. Donoghue says the display of ancient phones highlights the importance of innovation and how established brands can quickly become obsolete if they don’t evolve.

“The thing I’ve learnt in this business is as you scale and get bigger, you really have to look hard at everything you do and ask: ‘Is it built to last?’” he says. “My biggest FOMO as a group CEO is artificial intelligence. AI is not going to replace the 1,800 staff I have but we need to be leaning into it to create that superpower.”

It’s why the company has invested millions in a team of hundreds of engineers, data scientists and product managers. That team has developed technology products including a real-time management tool called Bidpro, an in-house revenue management system called Prism and a forecasting tool called Sphere to help them make better business decisions.

“I would describe us as a technology company masquerading as a holiday company,” says Donoghue. “Technology makes it easier for people to do their job.” However, he insists the company’s secret sauce is its people. Guests are asked how they slept after their first night in the property and a dedicated in-house team reviews everything that detracts from a positive experience.

“If you’ve got a property and you want to do pretty much everything yourself, other than the marketing, you go to Airbnb and Booking.com,” he says. “If you want somebody else to do everything for you – that can range from meeting and greeting, cleaning the property, linen, maintenance, dealing with all the guests, revenue management, marketing services, to health and safety advice – you come to us because we’re professional property managers.

“A lot of our owners want revenue and bookings with no hassle. They want to know somebody is looking after the property and dealing with things when they go wrong. That’s what we do.”

Forge Holiday Group is the UK’s largest property manager in terms of holiday units. The company has invested millions in its consumer apps and Donoghue believes in it so much, that he has entrusted it to market his own holiday home in Anglesey, north Wales. “I’m a huge believer in the phrase ‘eat your own dog food’,” he says. “They don’t treat me any differently.”

The company is also a registered B Corp and raises around £200,000 a year for good causes. Its most recent trading update saw a 22 per cent increase in group revenues, with underlying adjusted profit for the year broadly flat at £60.7m. Forge has plans to invest more than £150m over the next three years in developing its portfolio of UK locations and properties, technology platform, customer experiences and owner services.

Donoghue, who has a jar of honey produced from a local beehive that the firm sponsors on his desk, said he won’t be distracted by the sweet talk of achieving unicorn status. “We are a business that thinks for the long term,” he says. “If at the end of the next investment cycle, which is inevitable because in private equity there’s always a cycle, we end up having a valuation that makes us a unicorn then fine, but that’s not a driving factor in our business. We turn up to do a good job, look after our customers and create value. We don’t stand at the top of the mountain and say: ‘Look at us, we’re a unicorn’.”