THE founder of Ebookers, Dinesh Dhamija, likes to confound people. Tall, plummily spoken, and with a glint in his eyes that spells mischief, he is just not what you expect from a travel-trade entrepreneur.

For a start, he is so old-style posh. The son of Indian diplomats, educated at King’s, Canterbury, and Cambridge university, Dhamija, 54, walks and talks like a pukka gent straight out of a Merchant Ivory film.

“Travel is the Wild West as far as the internet is concerned,” he drawls incongruously, trying to settle himself in his fifth-floor office off London’s Blackfriars, “and that’s exciting, even for an old man like me.”

Yet behind the upper-crust demeanour, with his tightly clipped moustache and his grey hair swept back, his febrile business brain has spawned not one but two successful British travel firms: Flightbookers, a shopfront business, and Ebookers, the fast-growing online firm.

He is also toying with a third, an outsourcing facility in India that will take care of your organisational worries. Forget the languid charm. Dhamija, appropriately enough for a man with a bad back, just cannot sit still.

And that restlessness makes money. Dhamija has amassed a £100m fortune as he has taken gross sales through Ebookers from £15m in 1999 to £521m last year. He promises £1 billion before the end of this year.

But not everyone is wowed by Dhamija’s singular style. For a start, some in the City feel there is more talk than walk going on. Consequently, Ebookers, which Dhamija founded with his wife, Tani, has never gained the consistent following enjoyed by its glossier rival, Lastminute.

On Monday, Ebookers announced solid, first-quarter figures showing turnover and profit up, and its share price slid. Three days later, Lastminute announced widening, second-quarter losses, and its shares went up. That must hurt.

“Who knows what will happen with our share price,” shrugs Dhamija with characteristic indifference. “We focus on selling long-haul and medium-haul air tickets, and the institutions wrote us off to a certain extent; they were keener on short-haul. Now with the difficulties at Ryanair and Easyjet, they’re saying we did the right thing.”

If so, they have a funny way of showing it. But Ebookers’ critics point to key problems. Dhamija is chairman and chief executive of the plc, he and his wife have too much control, often results don’t match market expectations, and strategy seems to change at whim.

As the company’s own broker put it last week, if only everyone would concentrate on the fundamentals, not the “personality issues” — but with entrepreneurs, they don’t.

So when will Dhamija, who controls 42% of the company, split the chairman and chief executive role? “Look,” he says, “I haven’t done it yet because at the moment we’re just scratching the internet’s surface. Less than 10% of the business in Europe is done online, and we need to be able to turn on a sixpence. We need one chief, and not too many chiefs.”

And no jokes about Indians, please. Some see City racism behind Ebookers’ volatile share performance: white institutions don’t feel easy dealing with Asian senior management.