The first acquisition was made Friday by Yahoo!7; under which it bought online travel information company Totaltravel.com for $20 million. Yahoo!7 is the joint venture between Yahoo! and Channel Seven.

As per the chief executive Rohan Lund, in order to promote Channel Seven shows including The Great Outdoors, Yahoo!7 will merge the site with its own travel website and use Totaltravel.com's large audience and subscriber base. 

Lund says, "We'll run the site as it is today for another six months at least and then we'll migrate it to a revamped site with all our content. Total travel has done a great job of collecting the audience and the data... we have the programs and the technology to take it to the next level."

He added, "We're incredibly excited about the travel category and we know Australians are particularly interested in travel. Travel represents a large proportion of the online advertising market."

It was in 1999 when Totaltravel.com was found and now it lures nearly 1.2 million unique browsers a month, apart from having 500,000 subscribers to its email marketing list.  After Wotif.com, it is the second largest online information site. 

As per the sources from the industry, Totaltravel turned over about $10 million a year with earnings of $3 million.

However, Lund sees the site's information database as an equally important draw card. 

"Totaltravel.com.au contains 167,000 listings to restaurants, shops and tourist attractions. There are 293,000 listing in the UK, and these combined listings dwarf anything else that is available," he said. 

The concentration of Yahoo!7 is on verticals, and it is only really interested in leadership positions.

Totaltravel.com was bought by Yahoo from 12 owners, including founders Robert Baker Esther Pearson and Paul Fisher. Ex publishing and broadcasting chief exec, Peter Yates, and former Fairfax media and ninemsn executive, Martin Hoffman, were among the other shareholders. 

Lund is confident that the site will quickly overtake Wotif.com to become Australia's largest online travel site.

He said, "It's a great time to invest and we're confident that following the acquisition we will quickly move to the number one audience position in the online travel sites in Australia."