lastminute.com

[2] lastminute.com was founded in London by Martha Lane Fox and Brent Hoberman in 1998 to offer late holiday deals online.

[3] By January 2000, the site had more than 500,000 regular users[4] and its offerings had expanded to include travel, gifts and entertainment,[3] with a specialisation in selling distressed inventory.

[15] The introduction of a new website – allowing late deals to be targeted according to users' personal tastes – was delayed[16] but finally unveiled on 27 November 2000.

[17] 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.

[18] 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.

[22] In November 2003, Lane-Fox 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 analyst expectations of £4m.

[25] Following acquisition, a number of Sabre/Travelocity executives joined lastminute.com between 2005 and 2007, including Ed Kamm (former CFO of Travelocity, who was to succeed McCaig as CEO at the end of 2010),[26] Damon Tassone, Josh Feuerstein (who are now co-founders at Intent Media)[27] and Arun Rajan (now CTO at Zappos).

[28] In April 2007, Coolgorilla released a downloadable version of the Talking Phrasebooks for Nokia and Sony Ericsson mobile devices with lastminute.com branding.

[29] During 2008–2010, hires included Alistair Rodger (formerly Commercial Director at Hilton) and James Donaldson (who joined from News International to replace Kamm as CFO) and Mark Newton from AMEX.

[30] It was the above teams of executives that led the business through a five-year period after the acquisition which was characterised by increased profitability and in January 2009, lastminute.com released nru ("near you") a GPS-based restaurant search application for Android in the UK.

[33] During this period the company also divested itself of its travel agent 'bed booking bank' for hotels, MedHotels, which it sold to Thomas Cook for an undisclosed sum.

[35] In early 2011, lastminute.com launched a pan-European marketing campaign called 'Stories Start Here', to position the brand as an online leisure, entertainment and travel retailer.

[37] A revisited focus on 'the weekend' has also been an important development for the company, which created a dedicated section of their website in August 2011, providing weekend-specific offers.

An advertising campaign, with more than double the investment versus 2014, was launched early June and ran across three key markets – UK, France and Italy – representing 65% of revenues of the group at that time.

Founded in 2012, hotelscan has created a search engine for Hotels, Bed & Breakfasts, Hostels, Apartments and other types of accommodations, Its daily updated database has around 1.3 million properties, with data from over 100 online booking websites, provides travelers with relevant content to find room availability.

[41] The firm responded by discontinuing the relationship with highstreetmax.com and saying, 'Once our customers leave our site they are given an option to sign-up for a third-party cash back programme.

in the same month ranked Lastminute.com as "the worst booking site in the UK", with the year "being an even worse bet, because of the way it has treated customers during the coronavirus pandemic".