Ebookers
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- The correct title of this article is ebookers. The initial letter is shown capitalized due to technical restrictions.
Ebookers.com is an online travel company based out of the UK and is a wholly owned subsidiary of Travelport. ebookers is a pan-European travel website specialising in the mid and long-haul travel arena, offering a wide and varying range of travel products including hotel reservations, flights, car hire and sports packages. Cendant's (now Travelport) acquisition of ebookers was completed on 28th February 2005. At that time, ebookers was valued at $350 million.
Ebookers was formed in 1999, by Dinesh Dhamija, but its origins go back almost 20 years. In 1983 Flightbookers Ltd was founded, a London-based travel agency. Flightbookers grew into one of the UK's biggest travel agencies and in 1996 established a website, the first interactive travel website in the UK. This was so successful that in 1999 the internet arm was separated to form ebookers and the new company taken public with a flotation on Nasdaq in New York and Germany's Neuer Markt. The $61M raised at flotation was used to roll-out ebookers across Europe. In November 2000 ebookers bought Flightbookers for $15M reuniting the two companies.
ebookers did not to appear on the first page of Google search rankings in part because all websites were hosted on the same external IP address for about 10 months. However, with a change in the hosting infrastructure, it is back on Google results.
