Amsterdam-headquartered Booking.com’s ground transportation division is to open a new 222K SF global headquarters building at Allied London's Enterprise City in the new St John’s Quarter.

The deal means Manchester City Centre take-up is now racing towards a total in excess of 1.5M SF in 2018. Last year's total was 1.2M SF, and was the fifth consecutive year in which take-up topped 1M SF.

Manchester Office Agents Forum figures show take-up to 30 June of 327K SF in the second quarter, and 769K SF in the first half of 2018. Both figures were already significantly higher than the same periods in 2017, when take up totalled 282K SF in Q2 and 487K SF in H1.

"There's more big deals to come — we're working with clients looking for 90K SF and the occupiers now targetting Manchester are getting bigger and bigger," Cushman & Wakfield Director of Office Agency Rob Yates said.

"We'll smash last year's take-up figure in 2018, we're already just shy of 1M SF take-up with five months still to go. We might not manage the same figure in 2019, but the trend for take-up is definitely up."

Construction of Booking.com's new office, part of the 726K SF Enterprise City, will begin this year and is due to complete in 2020.

This will be the transport business' largest global hub outside Amsterdam and consolidate its four existing city centre sites at 201 Deansgate, Sunlight House, and 35 and 42 Fountain St. into the new building.

Booking.com say the deal represents a £100M investment and that the fit-out will make it one of the U.K.'s best workplaces. The transport division was named by website Glassdoor as one of the top 20 best employers in the country.

Booking.com is part of Booking Holdings Inc., the world’s third largest e-commerce company.

Booking Holdings recently invested $500M in Chinese ride-hailing app Didi Chuxing and already operates the Rentalcars.com and Rideways brands, alongside Booking.com.

Property consultants OBI acted on behalf of Booking.com.