 Poster: A snowHead
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I guess we should thank lastminute.com (parent company of ifyouski.com) for putting their money where their customers are by sponsoring the Daily Mail Ski Show. This is probably the best-known of the online travel companies, founded by Brent Hoberman and Martha Lane Fox in April 1998. But ...
Rival newspaper Telegraph (Daily and Sunday) - namely its Travel Awards - had bad news for the company over the weekend. They ranked lastminute.com as No. 1 'most disappointing' of the online travel companies, with Expedia.co.uk ranked 'best'.
Further details on this panel. [zoom button bottom right]
Have you used lastminute.com/ifyouski.com? My only experience of lastminute was booking some friends a long weekend in New York, and that seemed to go fine.
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Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
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Would one be safe to assume that lastminute.com don't advertise in Daily or Sunday Telegraph 
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Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
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This is what their correspondent Nick Trend says in his article:
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Perhaps one of the most interesting results thrown up by our reader survey is not among those that headed this category, but the one that came last - Lastminute.com (www.lastminute.com).
It may be the most famous name of the dotcom boom. It may be that you can find some good bargains once you have got to know the system. But for me that site has always been incredibly confusing, and by trying to offer too many things to too many different types of customer - from flights to "gift ideas" - it has lacked focus. |
Here's his full article.
Elsewhere, the Telegraph explain their survey procedure as follows:
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We sent out more than 30,000 questionnaires - 20,000 by mail and 10,000 over the internet - to readers of The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph.
These readers were in social classes A and B, had been on at least two foreign holidays in the past 12 months and had spent more than £500 per person on the trips.
The data from the returned questionnaires was processed by the market research agency NOP World.
Responses were weighted according to factors that included the total number of times a hotel, airline, destination or travel company was actually used by a reader and what proportion of those who had used it rated it as good, indifferent or bad.
This ensured that large and small companies could be measured objectively against each other. NOP achieved its rankings by dividing the number of mentions of "best" or "most disappointing" by the number of mentions of "use". |
Crucially, the emphasis seems to be how many questionnaires were sent out, not how many were returned!
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You need to Login to know who's really who.
You need to Login to know who's really who.
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Quote "had been on at least two foreign holidays in the past 12 months and had spent more than £500 per person on the trips" - lucky B***ers is what I say
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Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
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Lastminute.com is easy to navagate (unless you've the technical nouse of a monkey). But IMHO it doesn't deliver it's baseline identity - prices for "last minute" travel deals aren't any better on Lastminute.com than on sites like Expedia, or that can be found by approaching TOs direct. And, quite obviously, I've found a better selection of lastminute ski deals on ifyouski than I have on Lastminute.
I agree with the Telegraph (there's a first) - Expedia is best in terms of travel deals.
Lastminute's still the best for after-the-event-travel, like meal deals in London, or sports tickets.
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You'll need to Register first of course.
You'll need to Register first of course.
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Lastminute.not fails because it's site design is pants and it doesn't get you nearly the deals that expedia does. Or at least, it never has when I've tried it.
I used to really like Opodo but went off when they redesigned the site. I really don't like Opodo's animated "Searching 440 airline sto find you the best price" message. Why search 440 when only 3 fly London Geneva? Idiots.
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David Murdoch just in case there's a 3-leg stop-off including Frankfurt and Dubai, probably 
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