Expedia has signalled an all-out attack on the European travel market, saying it will mount an aggressive marketing campaign on the continent next year, in a strategic effort to seize market share from rivals Thomas Cook and Tui Travel.

Dara Khosrowshahi, chief executive of the world’s leading travel group, said he hoped to exploit his rivals’ preoccupation with integrating their newly merged businesses, and claimed they were weighed down by the costs of running bricks-and-mortar operations.

In a Financial Times interview, Mr Khosrowshahi laid out his stall for a much more internationally focused strategy. Expedia would break into the Indian travel market next year, he said, and he predicted that, faced with an increasingly mature US market, half of revenues would come from outside the US “in five or six years”.

More immediately, he warned that the travel industry would not escape the consequences of market and economic turmoil. While there was little evidence of a weaker US travel market, “I can’t imagine the consumer sentiment and the housing market not having some impact on consumer demand and as a result on travel next year.”

Seattle-based Expedia, which achieved revenue growth of 5.6 per cent in 2006 and 24 per cent in the last quarter, has a market capitalisation of $9.6bn. It is expected to generate more than $3bn in revenues next year.

Mr Khosrowshahi said the internet-only group, whose brands include Expedia, Hotwire, Hot­els.com and Trip­Advisor, would “invest more heavily” in Europe in 2008, as rivals struggled to keep both their integration and growth targets on track. However, he conceded that a consolidated compe­titive landscape would then make life tougher for Expedia in Europe.