Lastminute.com

lastminute.com is an online travel agency and e-tailer. The company which is currently owned by Sabre Holdings has its headquarters at 39 Victoria Street, London. It was founded by Martha Lane Fox and Brent Hoberman in 1998 and became an icon of the UK internet boom of the late 1990s, floating at the peak of the dot com bubble and trading on the London Stock Exchange under the symbol 'LMC'.
==From foundation to flotation: April 1998 to March 2000==
The online travel agency was founded in London by Martha Lane Fox and Brent Hoberman in 1998 to offer late holiday deals online. The founders were colleagues at media strategy consultants Spectrum 
By January 2000, lastminute.com had more than 500,000 regular users and its offering had expanded to include travel, gifts and entertainment. The company specialises in selling distressed inventory.
Ahead of its flotation, the company raised a further $31m from seven new investors; BAA led the round with a commitment of £13.25m. The other investors in this round were Bass Hotels & Resorts, Sony Music Entertainment, Mitsubishi Corporation Finance, Vivendi's Viventures, Starwood Hotels and priceline.com. These joined previous investors including Intel, Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom, Harvey Goldsmith and Global Retail Partners. At the time it opened offices in Paris, Munich and Stockholm. In the ten months to end December 1999, the company handled £37m of transactions, which generated £330,000 of income.
It floated on the London Stock Exchange on 14 March 2000. The shares were placed at 380p, valuing the company at £571m. The share price rose on the first day of trading to 511p, giving a valuation of £768m, before falling back to 492.5p later in the day. The paper wealth of the founders of the business went up to around £300m.
250,000 private investors had applied for shares in the flotation. 33m shares - 25% of the company - were being offered for sale, the bulk of which went to institutional investors. Private applicants received just 35 shares each.
==Public listed company: March 2000 to May 2005==
Within two weeks of listing, the share price had dropped to 270p. In the first week of April, the shares dipped below 190p, half the issue price. On Monday, 17 April 2000, after the biggest ever one-day fall in the New York stock market on the preceding Friday, £35bn were wiped off the value of the London Stock Exchange. By now, lastminute.com was trading at 30% of its flotation price.
Its share price was rising again when lastminute.com announced its first quarter's results on 6 May 2000. The company had handled £7.16m of transactions, up 68% compared with the previous period. During this period, the company had invested heavily in a new version of the website as well as international expansions. These factors pushed pre-tax losses up from £6m to £11m. The market responded positively at the better-than-expected figures and the shares closed the day up 8p at 245p. Two weeks later, however, the shares closed at 141p, as concerns over dotcom stocks increased, when boo.com went into liquidation. 
The introduction of a new website - allowing late deals to be targeted according to users' personal tastes - was delayed but finally unveiled on 27 November 2000.
Meanwhile, on 14 August, lastminute.com announced the acquisition of Degriftour, a French online travel agent, for £27.1m cash and 19.7m new shares, worth 162p each at the previous day's close.
Allan Leighton, the former head of Asda and president of the European division of Wal-Mart, joined the company as non-executive chairman on 20 October. The role was unpaid but he was granted options over 1m shares at a strike price of 137.5p. The market reacted with a 9p drop in the share price to 128p.
lastminute.com shares sank below 100p for the first time on 8 November and closed at 80p on 10 November. 
Full year results to 30 September 2000, announced on 4 December, were slightly ahead of analyst expectations. Losses increased from £4.5m to £35.7m, while transaction value increased from £2.64m to £34.2m, excluding transactions by Degriftour. The company generated more revenue from interest payments than from ongoing business activities. Shares rose 4.9% to 75p.
In November 2001 the company reported a £54m loss.
In November 2003 Martha Lane announced that she would step down as managing director at the end of the year - in which the company made its first pre-tax profit of £200,000, short of analysts expectations of £4m.
The company was acquired in 2005 by Sabre Holdings, owner of online travel company Travelocity, paying 165p per share, a 57 per cent premium to the shareprice before the company revealed it was in takeover talks but less than half the flotation price. The deal valued lastminute.com at £577 million. 
Up until 2005, the company had not made a net profit since it floated five years earlier. In February 2005, it reported pre-tax losses of £26.5m.
==Post-acquisition==
In January 2009, lastminute.com released nru ("near you") a GPS-based restaurant search application for Android in the UK . A US version was released in May 2009 together with restaurant review guide, Zagat .
lastminute.com launched a new campaign under the banner “Do more good stuff” early in 2009 created by Karmarama. An ad in February featured a thumbs-up style Mexican wave and ran in sequence across ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5.
==Criticisms==
lastminute.com faced heavy criticisms from pressure group Plane Stupid for their advertising campaign '5 Trips a Year,' a reference to the campaign in Britain calling for people to eat 5 portions of fruit and veg a day.
lastminute.com attracted much criticism on consumer sites and blogs regarding their association with highstreetmax.com, a brand owned by Adaptive Affinity, in turn owned by US corporation Vertrue.
Customers who have conducted transactions with lastminute.com are subject to negative option selling, whereby if they click or do not untick a certain box they find later that they were subject to unauthorised credit card withdrawals for membership schemes they did not sign up for, whose details they were not advised and whose supposed benefits they did not see. lastminute.com's only known comment is that this association gives Lastminute's customers a £10 discount, by means of a voucher. This attracted the attention of BBC Radio 4's consumer affairs programme You and Yours on 30 January 2008 and the consumer pages of the Daily Mirror in July 2008.
==References==
==External links==
* Customer Reviews for www.lastminute.com
* lastminute.com
Category:Internet companies of the United Kingdom
Category:Travel and holiday companies of the United Kingdom
Category:Travel websites
Category:Dot-com
Category:Internet properties established in 1998
Category:Online travel agencies