I booked a holiday with lastminute.com and they were unable to deliver what they promised and unwilling to admit or correct their mistake. in common with so many of lastminutes.com business ethos this was just the begining, i then fell into the snakepit of their customer service.

over 40 premium rate phone calls requesting help, being put on hold for 15 minutes, the promise of callbacks that never materialised, being shuffled from department to department, with nobody accepting responsibility.

their term priority customer service isa sick joke.all efforts to contact this company by e mail or letter yieled no response whatever.

nearly every complaint against this company mentions the same pattern of abuse. these are not isolated incidents but apattern of business practice and as such opens up the possibility of

a class action suit to seek redress for their wrongdoing.

they hide behind the internet and shirk their responsibility to their customers.

A friend and myself recently booked a holiday package through last minute.com. This was for a weekend trip to Barcelona with hotel and flight included. We were completely mis-lead by the advertisement into thinking the airport was a mere ten minutes away from our hotel. We were 'fooled' by the mis-match of hotel and airline. As per the advertise it stated the hotel accommodation was close to the airport we were being dropped off at. As a foreigner entering the country for the first time and insufficient grasp of the language this made things extremely difficult, as the description was totally incorrect.

We arrived at airport Rues, and there was no form of transport for us to get to from our airport. And we subsequently had to take a taxi to our hotel, and given the considerable distance and the fact that Reus is a different city from Barcelona made the cost 135 Euros. This immediately put us over budget in terms of transport costs alone. It additionally set our minds at worry as to how we were going to get to the airport early Sunday morning.

A simple indication of how far we were made to travel was that the cab driver had difficulty finding the hotel, and if we had landed in the same city we would not have had this difficulty. We reached the hotel at around 12 at night, this difficulty in simply arranging transport and getting to our hotel put a damper on the whole holiday. We were maiden with the problem of getting to the airport early in the morning and near helpless in a place were we did not speak the language.

Finally on the night of the second day, the hotel receptionist helped us search for train times and routes to arrive at the Reus airport on time. We had to leave the hotel at 5:30 the next morning to reach the airport by 9:30 to make our 11:00 flight. This was because we had to take another taxi at 25 euros to make a train in the city that only came hourly. Had we left later we would have missed our flight. The entire cost to us both was just under 180 Euros merely to travel from the airport and back. We are asking for compensation of 200 Euros to counter the fact that we were completely mis-lead my last-minute.com and went through extreme expense and inconvenience as well as emotional distress that stunted our holiday experience.

The amount of our compensation is something we are willing to negotiate. However I do not think it is too much to ask, as it is only through our own resourcefulness that we were able to avoid more expense in seeking the advice of the hotel staff and making an effort to travel early in the morning. As even the information offices and people working at metro stations were unfamiliar with the airport and could not advise us how to get there. Reus was so far from where we were that transport workers, at stations and even airport did not know what we were talking about. A taxi both ways would have cost us 270 euros. Since we had no information about these distances between Airport and hotel from our booking, we hold last minute.com responsible for the mis-match of hotel and airport. Had we known about these difficulties in advance we would have picked another package or made allowances beforehand. As it stands we not prepared for this unsuitable package holiday. Beware!

Kind regards,
Natasha Sundar.