Short Breaks Ltd began trading in January 1999 with the specific goal of providing good value, individually organised breaks to the cities then serviced, Paris, Brussels, Lille serviced by Eurostar.

In the intervening ten years the privately owned company has grown from a kitchen table business to one that has at times carried 50,000 customers a year to those destinations. In time the product has grown to include Disneyland Resort Paris, other Belgian cities and towns such as Bruges, Antwerp, Mechelen, Ghent and Ypres as well as utilising the connection Eurostar has with SNCF to offer access to France’s extensive rail network.

From it’s earliest days this ABTA and ATOL bonded company has recognised the importance of the internet (www.short-breaks.com) as a method of communication and sales tool and in 2002 was one the first UK companies in the city break sector to offer a fully online booking engine utilising direct access to Eurostar rail stock (ELGAR) the basis of which still powers the ecommerce site today.

In order to maintain customer interest the product offered by ShortBreaks Ltd. has grown from just offering Eurostar and a hotel. It now includes concerts breaks in Paris, Lille and Antwerp featuring artists as diverse as Radiohead to Elton John, sporting breaks to cover the Six Nations championships, the Annual Rugby Autumn internationals and Belgian Grand Prix and also cultural breaks to many exhibitions mainly in Paris’ premium museums such as the Lourve, Mesee D’Orsay and The Musee Picasso.

Short Breaks Ltd initial marketing was largely based around offline advertising in the newspapers servicing the Greater London area most notably Associated Newspapers
’Evening Standard, with an almost daily presence. With the rise of the power of search engines as a means to attract customers Short Breaks Ltd have embraced all forms of search engine marketing in it’s various forms most notably with Google.

In March 2007 the company was sold in order for the original owner Jerry Ellis to concentrate on his property interests and the new owners have undertaken to increase the product offering to includes breaks to the Western Mediterranean especially Rhodes and Crete, city breaks by air to cities such as Barcelona, Prague, Amsterdam and Dublin and also to tap into the self drive holiday market throughout Europe.