2000 hotels and apartments are offered online by Thomson through an initiative called "holiday bed bank". It allows users to book individually accommodation from a variety of 1500 hotels in 48 beach destinations, and almost 500 city hotels, from £1 per night.

Furthermore, Thomson claims that they will obtain the biggest range of "quality checked beach accommodation" around, having achieved bookings from 1 night to 99 nights available.

This movement towards independent bookings has been made due to the market trend having been enhanced 138 per cent since 1996.

Sales and marketing director Miles Morgan said that "this is definitely not the end of package holidays. We still sell around four million package holidays a year and we predict that the market will remain at around that level for the next few years". "But the demand is growing in the tailor-made travel market and we want to be at the forefront of growth in this area.", he added.