The Spanish hotel and resort chain Sol Melia broke the €100m sales barrier through its website solmelia.com in 2006.

Traffic figures for solmelia.com also show a 23% increase on 2005 to reach 31 million, the company said.

The number of hotel searches on the site was up 80% to almost 21 million.

For the first time since the site was launched in 1997, sales in languages other than Spanish overtook Spanish sales, while sales of resort hotels exceeded those of city hotels, Sol Melia said.

The most important market, nevertheless, remained domestic Spain, responsible for almost half of the sales, although the German, American, UK and French markets showed strong growth.

The most popular destinations on the hotel chain’s website were Mexico and the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean and Madrid, the Costa Blanca and Mallorca in Spain. In the rest of Europe the most popular destination was Italy.

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By Daniel Thomas

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