Lastminute www.lastminute.com

Never use LASTMINUTE.COM even as LAST…

Never use LASTMINUTE.COM even as LAST RESORT.

Worse than Ryanair. LASTMINUTE.COM charged me over 60% for cancellation of a flight. That i immediately rebooked.

I needed to include another peice of luggage for my flight and was quoted over £350 for an additional 20kg which included a handling charge. I had flexible insurance for cancellation purposes so took advantage of my insurance cover. I was refunded less than £200 on a £460 flight package. There excuses were 'handling charges ' special arrangements & the cost of the flexible insurance. I was told that ,I should read terms & conditions. I am partially sighted and physically disabled. Not a nice way to be treated and exploited, also felt they did not careless.

Date of experience: 23 December 2024

Booked a holiday had a NHS discount £50 off . Applied to promotion box & worked but tried so many times to pay & it would not allow . Phoned them but just fined off . Booked the holiday without the discount, returning from holiday & im stopped & charged £80 for baggage. This was all included with the holiday but due to their errors it was not on the system. Finally refunded but not including the conversion charge . They refused to pay this even though due to errors I was charged the baggage fee. Opened up a PayPal dispute & yep they paid up .

Why did I have to take such measures to get a refund?.

Jokers

I booked two rooms at Saja Al Madinah through Lastminute.com, trusting the 4-star rating and excellent reviews on their site. Shortly after booking, I decided to check reviews elsewhere, including TripAdvisor, which shows the hotel having a 3-star rating, and was concerned by multiple recent reviews with reports of mold, cigarette smoke, and poor cleanliness in the majority of recent reviews. As I was traveling with a 3-year-old child and a pregnant family member with epilepsy, the conditions were simply unacceptable for us.

I wanted to see if I had the option to cancel, given the significant disparity in reviews and concerns about the hotel’s suitability for an individual with epilepsy. I contacted Lastminute’s live chat and spoke with Xhesika, who instructed me to reach out to the hotel directly. She explained that if the hotel agreed to a free-of-charge cancellation, Lastminute would then forward the case to customer care for a full refund.

I followed this instruction and spoke to Rahat Mahmood from the Saja Al Madinah hotel booking team, who kindly confirmed they would cancel the reservation free of charge due to our medical concerns. I forwarded this confirmation to Lastminute’s customer care team as advised.

Lastminute's response was vague, only acknowledging the hotel’s approval of a cancellation. Before proceeding, I asked them to confirm a full refund, and if they couldn't provide one, I wanted the bookings to remain intact, as we still needed a place to stay and would rather stay in an unclean hotel than cancel the holiday entirely. Instead, Lastminute canceled our booking without any refund and even suggested I make a claim with my travel insurance.

As I had travel insurance, I contacted them regarding this case. They stated that they do not cover this but mentioned that Lastminute’s actions were completely unethical.

I was confused, as I only followed what Xhesika stated on the live chat, and requested that they stop the cancellation since I couldn’t afford to lose the money already spent on both rooms. I found their call center number (which I don’t understand why they don’t provide on their website) and managed to speak to a representative, who disconnected the call on us. An hour later, I tried again and got in contact with Bora in their Albania call center, who assured me she would stop the cancellation.

Following the conversation with Bora, I received an email from Lastminute stating the cancellation had been stopped and both bookings were still confirmed.

Throughout this ordeal, I stayed in contact with the hotel staff, who later confirmed that Lastminute had already canceled the reservation, despite Lastminute repeatedly assuring me that the booking was still valid.

I contacted Lastminute, and their response was to assure me again that the booking remained active. I now have no faith in Lastminute to tell the truth and am not willing to risk arriving at the hotel only to find our booking canceled.

The stress, back-and-forth communication, and contradicting information from Lastminute made the whole experience incredibly frustrating and exhausting. Ultimately, we were forced to cancel our holiday, as we couldn’t afford to book another hotel at the last minute.

All we did was follow the advice from Lastminute's customer service, only to be passed from one department to another and misled throughout the process. I’ve retained all chat logs with both the hotel and Lastminute and plan to take further action. I would strongly advise others to avoid booking with Lastminute.com due to their lack of accountability and dishonest practices.

I sincerely hope that the company's CEO or anyone from the head office reads this review!

The way the company's employees and customer service handled our Booking with ID: 2659301613 is disastrous, awful and beyond comprehension. A completely useless and rude customer service that is almost impossible to reach, a phone number that doesn't exist and a refund that you will never get back even if your flight is canceled.

Our flight was canceled and a refund from the airline (Vueling in this case) was paid back to “lastminute”. In spite of so many mail contracts with their useless customer service, our refund was never paid back. In simple terms,they kept the refund for themselves and have broken every legal right that customers have, and apparently this is a common practice in this agency!

A complaint was filed to The European Consumer Centres Network (ECC Net).

So my advice to you who's reading this review is :

Do not book anything through their website or this fake agency.This is a free piece of advice unless you want to give away your money for nothing.

This website/agency has specialized in shamming people. All the positive reviews with 4 or 5 stars are most definitely fake!. Probably just the employees themselves writing these false positive reviews to deceive you.

You've been warned!

Lastminute running a practised sham

It seems this company is practising a click through Bait and switch sham. I got a price on Cheapflights.com quoted by lastminute including a check-in bag but when I paid for the transaction, the message I got was that it may take 3 days to confirm the booking which put me on alert as this was not something i have seen before. Then when they confirmed the booking they stated that it was excluding check-in baggage for which there was an extra fee which increased the total by 50%. I immediately tried to get through to them which is impossible as they do NOT publish a customer care number and their webchat agent a Mariglen just kept saying you confirmed the booking and if you have proof that this included baggage they would look into it. I stated that they will have the whole log recorded from when i came through to the booking and on what terms and under GDPR I requested that. She did not reply to that even when asked twice. As a customer who records the web history ? I have not needed to but maybe it is something I have to look into in future. I asked her for a copy of the webchat transcript which she said would be available at the end. It was not which is clearly another sham they pull to make sure you never have a record of the conversation. I then immediately notified my Credit card company of this as an attempted crime; they told me that the billling was not even done by the company i expected but another one and the billing company had even retained my card details to sign me up for a subscription for a service I had NOT consented to. The credit card agent stated that as this was a suspected fraud, they would cancel the card and cancel the subscription and investigate the transaction. Hopefully this then results in a full refund which can apparently take nearly a month. In the meantime, I went back into the same travel search engine to see if that route still has has seats and pricing and surprise surprise lastminute is not shown but the price I paid did include baggage directly from the airline itself. So it is clear that Lastminute has not done this for the first time.

I am very disappointed with how long it takes to get things done. It feels like I’ve been taken hostage by Lastminute.com. The hotel I selected was shown as available online, yet the agent’s email response says otherwise. I was also misled by a previous agent who assured me I would receive a call, but no one contacted me. This is extremely poor customer service. Your web chat agents are unhelpfully cold and robotic; it felt like I was speaking to a chatbot. When I requested to speak with a supervisor, I was denied. Changing this trip has become an incredibly stressful experience, and I’m regretting using your service.

booked a flight on Lastminute, the airline cancelled the flight, the airline confirmed a full refund to the same method of payment as they've cancelled the flight, but still last minute was deducting 15% from my money as "handling fee" where they didn't handle anything, they even asked me to contact the airline to process the refund they didn't bother to handle this on my behalf. and their customer service and their complaint department showed extremely poor communication to handl this issue.

I wouldn't recommend Lastminute.com if you're going on a long-haul or expensive holiday. I hardly travel abroad, but saved up £5,000 to take the family away, and the process of booking using Lastminute.com was a bit rubbish basically. Here's the list of problems:

Once they took the money from me it was very hard to make contact with the right team afterwards - endless phone options 'please select option 6' etc.

The agent spelt my daughters middle name wrong so I had to ask Lastminute.com to correct it. 2 days before the flight they still hadn't done that so I ended up calling the Airline (at my expense) and they corrected the spelling error in 15 minutes. Thanks Lastminute.com!!

The day before flying out, Lastminute.com called me out of the blue and told me the Airport transfer service i'd paid for had pulled out, and would not be meeting us at the airport. Thanks Lastminute.com!!

Lastminute.com told me they would refund the £120 I had paid for the transfer, but they couldn't help me secure a new one - that would be down to me! Thanks Lastminute.com!!

I then had to call the hotel direct (in Portugal) at my cost in phone bills, who were able to help... I shouldn't have had to do that the day before the holiday. Thanks Lastminute.com!!

All in all, pretty incompetent, unhelpful, god knows how much of my £5000 they pocketed for that service, it's a disgrace so i would not recommend!

Took £4,600 from me for a trip paid £960 deposit then noticed flight was wrong, contacted them immediately told me to wait few days, little did I know it was so the could go into my account the next day and take the ball! Then told me there was nothing they could do didn’t even offer to arrange or fix flight so ended up losing all my hard earned cash that I had saved all year for???? they are a company registered in Switzerland so no recourse of getting your money back once they have taken your money in their Swiss bank account also go under the umbrella of BravoNet so do not use, use a reputable abta registered travel agent not these sham artists

This is a PAID subscription!!!! When you go to pay for a hotel+flight you will be offered two prices, the pre selected cheaper price is the travel extra pack or you can select the other option which appears as being more expensive without it. There is NO information on their site anywhere about the travel extra pack but having downloaded my invoice I have found out (and confirmed with them) that the travel extra pack is a one year subscription costing £128!!!! (All you’re told is that you receive a £70 voucher for your next booking) If I had not downloaded the invoice I would never have known I had paid for this. I travel regularly for work but thought I’d try them for the first time and I’ve never come across anything so sneaky, there’s zero transparency and no indication that this is something you pay for. It also says you have free cancellation which is also misleading because they don’t tell you that this does not apply to any flights. We also found AFTER booking that our second flight did not include any hold luggage despite the fact it had previously stated that it did, we had to pay to add these on the day of our flight. HORRIBLE company on the take