Forget second-hand furniture and designer handbooks, eBay wants you to buy your next shortbreak through its site.

The auction site is already well-established in the travel sector in Germany where it has around 10,000 travel offers on its site at any one time. It is also an established travel retailer in Austria and Switzerland, but travel purchases have yet to take-off in the UK.

Thomson started selling holidays through eBay towards the end of 2004, but now established hoteliers have joined the fray, such as Millennium Hotels, Park Inn and Great Hotels of the World, as well as independent hotels and smaller independent travel agencies who see it as another way of shifting shortbreaks.

Currently there are about 300-400 travel offers on eBay's UK site at any one time, with many offers listed under its "tickets and travel" section being concert or sporting event tickets, but this is expected to swell this summer.

The most significant indicator that the auction site is stepping up its UK presence is the decision by the company that facilitates the sale of travel products on eBay, called Cultuzz, to base two travel-specific staff members in a new office in Liverpool, opening in July.

For users, the predominant driver of buying travel over eBay is the potential bargains – although a frantic bidding war can see prices explode five-fold or more in the last few minutes or second of the auction, and with between 200 or 600 people on average viewing each travel offering at the moment, the competition can get fierce. For those booking hotels that are unfamiliar, there's an effective user feedback system, as with all eBay purchases.

User reviews are becoming increasingly important in the travel buying process and on eBay it is harder to abuse them than on sites such as TripAdvisor or Wikipedia, because only people who have paid for the hotel or shortbreak can leave feedback. There's also a chance for the seller to respond, so a hotelier may be able to defend say, a noisy night by stating there was a one-off fire alarm incident, and so on.

eBay is staying tight-lipped on whether it will start selling flights and package holidays alongside packaged shortbreaks and hotels, but eBay senior category manager for travel, Karim Lankarany told Times Online Travel: "It is fair to assume that the UK site will probably go the same way as Germany has, adding flights and holidays as well as hotels."

Hotels are listed for three, seven or ten days and the hotel pays less than 50 pence to list them, but eBay takes a 5-7 per cent commission on each sale. Users can search by destination then bid in the auction, or scroll down the page to buy the hotel at a fixed priced, if they don't want to risk losing the room in the auction.

A spokesman for Cultuzz told Times Online Travel that he's investigating the possibility of facilitating the listing on eBay of travel companies that offer "dynamic packaging", an industry buzzword that means users can book a hotel, flight and theatre tickets, say, and pay for them in one transaction, thereby "building" their own holiday.

But an eBay spokesperson said this would be at best a long way off, if it were to go ahead at all. Holiday auction sites are not new.

Big travel companies including MyTravel and TUI have their own auction sites, mytravel.co.uk and Latedeals.com, respectively, as does Lastminute.com, with auctions.lastminute.com. It's a competitive market but eBay hopes that its established and trusted brand, which is one of the most popular across the internet, will put it ahead of the names that are already well established in travel.

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