Holiday.com is described as the “holy grail” of the travel industry by Breathe Luxury, a company that brokers domain names and which is selling it.

It has the potential be a leading international travel brand, with the firm that buys it expecting to rub shoulders with existing brands that hold equally memorable, search-engine friendly names such as Booking.com and Hotels.com.

As the word “holiday” is so well-used by people researching their trips online, any products and services on Holiday.com will be easily found by consumers, it is claimed.

More than 90 per cent of travel companies already try to capitalise on the popularity of “holiday” by making it one of the top five words they use to optimise searches for their own websites.

According to the pre-auction promotional hype, major travel companies have been competing to secure the rights to Holiday.com for years, but so far, without success. The domain was held by an American company for the last 16 years but has been lying dormant.

Previous seven-figure bids have apparently been rejected in favour of an auction at the World Travel Market, a networking trade event for the global travel industry, to be held at the London Excel building on November 5.

It will be one of the first times that such a potentially lucrative domain name has been auctioned off with as many major industry players present.

“It’s in these companies’ best interests to acquire this domain name because they will lose their market share once Holiday.com goes live,” Farad Laaforce, managing director of Breathe Luxury, told Telegraph Travel. “They will end up having to spend more money optimising for that keyword for their businesses anyway.”

Some of the most expensive domain names ever to be bought include Insurance.com, which was apparently snapped up for ￡21million in 2010; PrivateJet.com, bought for ￡18million in 2012; Sex.com, which went for ￡8million in 2010 and Hotels.com, selling for a reported ￡6.6million in 2001.

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