European travel site EasyVoyage says it hopes to make two metasearch engine acquisitions within the next two months as it looks to continue its strong European growth plan.
Almost 12 months to the day since the company received a funding round of Euro 31 million, EasyVoyage bosses say rival sites or those that can add significantly to its product range are under its microscope.
Likely contenders are not being made public, but such sites are expected to be in EasyVoyage's core markets away from its French homeland in the UK, Germany, Italy or Spain.
The company also plans to make a further purchase in the early part of 2011, says CEO Jean-Pierre Nadir, but stresses it is not in the frame to acquire Opodo from Amadeus.
According to Comscore figures for July 2010, EasyVoyage now stands in third place across Europe for metasearch and media travel sites, behind TripAdvisor and Zoover.
At 3.4 million unique visitors a month it also leads the likes of Yahoo Travel (2.5m), Cheapflights (1.9m), Kayak (1.8m) and MSN Travel (1.4m).
The pledge to acquire other meta players is not the first time EasyVoyage has made public and bold statements - when the company first launched in the UK, for example, it expected to be in the top five travel media sites in the UK by the end of 2009.
However, it currently sits below Cheapflights, Travelsupermarket, Skyscanner, Kayak and Dealchecker in the UK, according to Comscore again for July 2010.
Nadir admits the UK marketplace is "more difficult than we expected" but the company is happy to have reached its current "good position".
Two areas of the site expected to be pushed heavily in the coming months, Nadir says, are its EasyOpinions user review system and a rather quirky hotel search system known as EasyPanorama.
The system works by allowing the user to rotate a 360-degree image wall of hotel properties on a dedicated part of the site. Clicking on an individual hotel gives the user another 360-degree view pane of the property itself.