Trevor from the UK writes to tell us of his experience booking flights through the internet based travel company lastminute.com. He says:

Be very careful before booking flights through lastminute.com. I recently booked two flights a week or two in advance of travelling and elected to collect my tickets via the e-ticket mechanism. My account was duly debited for two tickets and I received confirmation to the effect that the e-tickets had been issued. So far so good. We then arrived at the airline check-in desk on the morning we were due to fly only to be told by the airline that they only had one e-ticket on the system and had no record of a second e-ticket ever being issued.

We were unable to contact lastminute.com (the only obvious way of contacting anyone at lastminute.com seems to be via an online web form) and we were faced with the choice of either;

A] Abandon our holiday

B] Pay the airline to issue the other e-ticket

C] Go by myself and leave my wife in England [ just kidding… 🙂 ]

We took option [B] and I contacted lastminute.com to obtain an explanation and a refund for the second e-ticket that we were charged for but never received. I received an email informing me that my wife’s name was too long (longer than a piece of string, presumably) and so they hadn't issued the second e-ticket. No explanation as to why I hadn't been informed of a problem prior to turning up at the airport, or even an apology. The best they could offer was to “request a refund via the airline on [our] behalf”.

We're still waiting for our money, and I'm now considering legal action.

Caveat emptor, as they say.

If you want to contact Trevor, he can be e-mailed on: trev_gs@blueyonder.co.uk