Lastminute.com was founded by Martha Lane Fox and Brent Hoberman in London; the year was 1998, back when last minute travel websites were virtually unheard of. In fact, when lastminute.com was founded, travel booking websites in general were a rarity. The majority of people in 1998 still patronized brick and mortar travel agencies, a thing that is now almost entirely of the past.
The company’s initial mission was to provide users with late holiday travel deals. And it was an overnight success. By the time the year 2000 rolled around, in just 2 short years, lastminute.com boasted over 500,000 regular monthly users. lastminute.com also greatly expanded its offerings by then, widening its scope to include travel bookings, gifts, and entertainment, specializing in selling distressed inventory on the cheap.
Prior to its expansion, the company raised $31 million from investors. This enabled lastminute.com to open new offices in Paris, Munich, and Stockholm. During the fiscal year 1999, lastminute.com reported that they had handled £37 million worth of transactions, generating £330,000 of net income.
lastminute.com joined the stock market as a publicly traded company in March of 2000. After a rather volatile few years of stock valuation, with the company’s stock price showing a steady downward trend, lastminute.com was acquired by Sabre Holdings in 2005, the parent company of Travelocity. This effectively saved lastminute.com from certain doom, turning things around significantly. Upon the acquisition, the company was valued at £577 million. Prior to 2005, lastminute.com shareholders had not made a cent in net profit.
With a new and seasoned team of executives (former heads of Sabre and Travelocity), lastminute.com began its steady and determined ascent to the top of the online travel space, narrowing in on its travel deals and gradually phasing out its selling of distressed merchandise. Today, lastminute.com stands tall as one of the most widely used flight and hotel booking sites in Europe, as well as a key player globally.
The site, however, is not without its fair share of criticism. I feel obliged to note the issues that people have taken with the site before we delve into the innerworkings of this giant travel site and everything that it has to offer. This way, if anything I am about to tell you is a dealbreaker, you can know before we get too deep into the woods, so to speak.
lastminute.com came under fire in 2009 for its affiliation with a brand known as High Street Max, a company that has been accused of duping customers with negative option selling. This basically means that customers were forced to manually opt out of additional charges and memberships by unticking boxes at checkout, resulting in many unauthorized or stealthy credit card charges. Although this is obviously not cool, to lastminute.com’s credit, they did cut ties with High Street Max once the unfavorable practice was publicized (it drew the attention of both BBC4’s You and Yours and the Daily Mail in 2008.
In more recent controversies, though, lastminute.com was ranked the 49th worst (of 53) travel sites when it comes to issuing refunds for cancelled flights. The company has also received a Net Promotor Score of -87. Only 4 other sites evaluated by this metric received a lower score than lastminute.com. So, although this site can be an excellent resource for finding insanely cheap last minute travel accommodations, do beware of these fine print misfortunes before deciding on whether this is the best travel site for you.