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Lastminute.com Update

For those of you who are familiar with my previous post on Lastminute.com; Lastminutecom Rant I thought I should give you a bit of an update. Following some tweets the Marketing Manager of Lastminute.com contacted me via Twitter.

I was given his email address so I informed him of my experience, sent screenshots of the errors I was getting and sent him the link to my blog post.

Below is the reply I received with the explanation:

Hi Lee,

I’m really sorry to hear about your experience on our website, perhaps I can offer an explanation.

We are currently in the process of migrating our website here in Ireland to a newer global platform as part of the lastminute.com group. The issue you experienced from LM1 to LM2 - caused a redirection to the UK version of the lastminute.com website - where pricing and buying paths are now UK and in £Sterling.

Issue number 2, is regarding the lack of availability for your chosen hotel - which was a special rate we had negotiated with Travel Lodge - with carrying a global supply of over 80,000 hotels from different systems, a break in connection was identified for this particular deal. This is being rectified as all of lastminute.com are moving to a single transaction inventory over the coming months.

Both of these issues have been identified and assigned a priority bug reference for fixing.

All of this in no way excuses the poor service and experience you’ve encountered, again I can’t apologise enough and completely understand your frustration.

As a token of goodwill, I’d love to offer you free night hotel stay anywhere in Ireland - just let me know the location and date and I’ll get you hooked up with somewhere nice.

Regarding your reply tweet on our Top Secret Hotels, these are special negotiated rates where we have discounted rates up to 45% off branded hotels - which are an excellent way of booking 4* & 5* hotels for a fraction of the cost.

Some background information on our operation in Dublin, we are a tightly knit 6 person team who are enthusiastic and passionate about our company, as such we acknowledge some aspects where we don’t perform as well as we’d like to - so your feedback is appreciated.

If there’s anything else I can help with, don’t hesitate to contact me.

Thanks,

Barry

barry hand
marketing manager

I told Mr Hand that I would post an updated entry to show the response.

I believe nowadays with the power of the Internet & the popularity of Twitter growing it is a really good idea for Companies to be on there. I didn’t write my post for any other reason than to share my experience.

Thank you Barry for your explanation. I wish more Companies where more proactive with their online awareness.

Mwah