Holidaybreak buys Dutch dot.com travel agent

Holidaybreak, the camping and hotel breaks group, has become the latest company to snap up a dot.com business, paying £23m for a Dutch online travel agent.

The group will pay cash for Business Reservation Centre Holland (BRC), which specialises in short breaks and runs the Netherlands' third most visited travel website.

Richard Atkinson, the chief executive of Holidaybreak, said he had got a bargain compared with recent deals in the online travel sector. "BRC makes margins, makes profits and generates cash, which is not the same for some other businesses in the same industry," he said. "We have paid around 10 times earnings before interest and tax for BRC, which is growing strongly. The multiples on other recent deals are in a different stratosphere."

BRC takes more than 350,000 bookings a year and revenues are expected to grow by 26 per cent this year, with earnings forecast to rise 63 per cent.

Analysts said they expected BRC to increase Holidaybreak's earnings by about 4 per cent in 2005. Ben Archer, an analyst at Charles Stanley, said: "With BRC increasing the group's exposure to the fast-growing short leisure hotel break market as well as potentially providing a platform for expansion into other European territories, we see it as a potentially attractive bolt-on acquisition."

The deal follows a spate of takeovers of internet businesses, particularly in the travel sector. In the past few weeks, Cendant, the US travel group, has paid $405m (£212m) for ebookers and $1.1bn for the private holiday wholesaler Gullivers Travel Associates, which has substantial online activities. EBay recently bought Rent.com, a Californian-based rental property website, for $415m.

QXL Ricardo, once billed as Europe's answer to EBay and a former dot.com darling, has been the subject of takeover rumours and yesterday said it would be considering potential bids that value the group at more than the valuation given to it by a management buyout.