Momondo Group says it is ready to come out fighting after a few years lurking in the shadows, watching as the metasearch world went kind of crazy.
The UK-based company, which runs the global Momondo metasearch and Cheapflights deals brands, has decided to reveal its first financial results for many years after starting 2014 in what CEO Hugo Burge says is an "upbeat mood" and with "lots to talk about".
Revenue across the group has increased by 29% year-on-year to £14.5 million for the first quarter of 2014, with EBITDA over the same period up by a third to £3.2 million.
It is forecasting around £50 million in revenue for the full year 2014.
The company is certainly making reasonable strides with its overseas ambitions after seeing revenues from international operations climb from 74% to 84% year-on-year.
Burge says the company deliberately took a back seat for a few years after acquiring Momondo from its Danish backers in May 2011.
During that time the company has rebranded to the Momondo Group (to help coordinate its international expansion and have a generic brand name, Burge says) and integrated a lot of the technology and expertise around the company.
Most importantly, Burge says, the company is debt-free and investing in new products and expansion, not least with a particular focus on booming markets such as Russia and others in Asia and South America. It already has, however, a presence in some 25 countries.
Mobile services, especially at the Momondo end of the business, are also becoming a crucial part of how Burge sees the travel search business evolving. Some 40% of visits to the Cheapflights brand come from mobile devices, for example.
With now almost 200 staff in the company (some in London, others in Denmark and regional offices - a third of which are IT), complete alignment of the two companies and decent growth, Burge says it is "like a second coming for us and we're ready make some noise about it".
Burge concedes that the the period following the Momondo acquisition was when metasearch found a "solid footing" in the industry, not least due to the Priceline acquisition of Kayak.
He argues that some metasearch brands suddenly found themselves with decent growth and, perhaps more importantly, "acceptance by online travel agencies" as valuable distribution channels for products.
This does not mean it's been easy, as Burge says: "Metasearch is still very hard to make profitable as you need scale. Lots of it."
What is important to Momondo is that it is now in charge of its own destiny, Burge says, with in-house technology running large parts of the business (it has never used a GDS, ITA Software et al for flights, although hotels is currently powered by HotelsCombined) and it being completely debt-free.
The "tipping point" was 2013, and this year will be when it reveals "innovative eye-opening products), Burge claims.
Fighting talk, indeed.