European online luxury hotel booking service Splendia.com is to target the UK market in a bid to challenge the high profile of rival site Mr & Mrs Smith.
Splendia.com launched in 2004 and currently attracts around a fifth of its audience from the UK.
Dedicated sites for France – which supplies one in four of its overall users – and Spain will be joined by dedicated versions for Japanese and Mandarin speakers in the coming months.
The Barcelona-based company is to hit the UK consumer travel shows with a major branding campaign in the coming months as well as continuing with its aggressive online search marketing campaign.
Across Europe the company spends around Euro 700,000 a month on search marketing, hotel business director Régis Perruchot told Travolution.
However he stressed the site would not follow Mr & Mrs Smith with a flight meta search white label service but said that an offline travel agent log-in programme would be implemented early in 2009 to compliment its existing booking facilities.