After a year in the job, the next step for Ciaran Lally, managing director of Ebookers in Ireland, is to offer the same price-matching guarantee for car hire as he introduced at the start of this year for hotels, he says.

Under that guarantee, Ebookers promises to match any hotel price a net surfer can find online within 48 hours.

"If you're priced more than 5% above the competition online, you get nothing, " Lally said. "That's what we put the effort into last year, to get the back-end right and be as efficient as we could."

Visitor numbers to the site have been increasing by 2030% a year, he said. But when you're selling on the web, it's not about how many visitors your site gets, he says. It's about how many buy something. "Last year was about trying to improve conversion rates, which we live and die by."

Conversion rates more than doubled last year he stated. This year is about stepping up marketing, about "getting more aggressive on pricing".

For smaller local players, life is going to get a lot tougher, he forecasts.

Through Ebookers's owner, international travel giant Cendant, it has access to a database of 20,000 hotels, and he says this means it can afford to operate on higher margins. "One of the areas most difficult for smaller players is to get that access."

With lastminute. ie already open for business, the next big international player that Lally expects to enter the fray is Expedia. "I'm waiting for Expedia any day."

From his office in the Irish Life Centre in Dublin's Abbey Street, he is doing his best to be ready to take on all comers.

Lally expects Ebookers to make gross sales of 50m in Ireland this year. With online travel bookings predicted to grow by 20%-25% annually until 2009, he says it is all to play for. "There is no one player who owns the space."

Ireland is around three years behind more developed markets such as Scandinavia in the online travel field, he says, but he expects activity to increase in line with improved broadband penetration.

An estimated 5% of the Irish travel industry is online, less than half the European average of 11.6%.

But though the country is lagging behind other markets, changing trends are already starting to bite. Last year, 10% of Irish travel agents went out of business.

Lally also expects to spur competition in the car hire markets by dropping rates.

All that is needed to stimulate the market is for "two or three players to drop margins", he said. "It will certainly cut our margins, but I feel online car hire needs to be stimulated."