lastminute.com Brand Guidelines: A Portobello Road Start, a 2000 Float & a Pink Flamingo

Late deals, two founders and a dotcom float.

lastminute.com was founded in London in 1998 by Martha Lane Fox and Brent Hoberman, who had been colleagues at the media strategy consultancy Spectrum, English Wikipedia says. The Guardian reported in December 2014 that Hoberman started it “in a broom cupboard” at the back of an office on Portobello Road. The idea is in the name: the site sold late deals on holidays, hotel rooms and flights, travel close to its date that would otherwise go unsold, and by 2000 it had added gifts and entertainment, English Wikipedia says.

The company floated on the London Stock Exchange on 14 March 2000. The Guardian reported that day that the shares rose sharply in the first hour of trading, that each private applicant had been allowed only 35 shares, and that the company had 1,100 supplier relationships, according to Lane Fox. It already ran websites for France, Germany and Sweden, sold through a digital television service and had deals with mobile networks for phones that could reach the internet, the paper said. The shares then fell well below their issue price within weeks, and the company did not make a pre-tax profit until 2003, English Wikipedia says. The Guardian later described it as a symbol of the dotcom boom and bust.

Growth came by purchase as well as by marketing. In August 2000 lastminute.com bought the French online agency Degriftour, English Wikipedia says, and in 2005 it was itself bought by Sabre Holdings, the American owner of Travelocity. Hoberman stepped down as chief executive in April 2006, The Guardian reported. Under Sabre the site ran limited flash sales branded “When It’s Gone It’s Gone” from 2009 and kept the car-hire business Holiday Autos, English Wikipedia says.

A web address for a name, and a pink flamingo.

The brand name is a web address written in lowercase, with the “.com” kept as part of it; the group still writes it that way on its corporate site. The words carry the original promise, booking close to departure, and they have stayed in use while the business moved towards holiday packages planned further ahead. In February 2018 the French trade title TourMaG reported a pan-European campaign for the brand’s 20th anniversary in the UK, France and Italy, built around a flamingo “as pink as its logo” and a new signature, “Get busy living.” It opened on Facebook and Instagram with short videos aimed at a younger audience, and moved to television in March, TourMaG reported.

In March 2026 Decision Marketing reported that lastminute.com had appointed the agency BBH to develop a new brand platform for its main European markets, with the aim of going back to its roots as late bookings rose again. In early meetings, the magazine said, BBH studied what the travel category does, what to avoid and how to make a virtue of the lastminute.com name. BBH took over from the agency Trouble Maker, which had devised the “Never Too Late to Book” platform. The brand has also worked with Publicis London, Adam & Eve/DDB and OMD, and is known for running its media buying in-house, Decision Marketing said; its head of brand told the title the company wanted to “take on a category full of tropes.”

The pink name now fronts a group of sister brands. The corporate site lists weg.de in Germany, Volagratis in Italy, Rumbo in Spain and the flight-search brand Bravofly, alongside two price-comparison sites and an in-house media agency, and describes the group’s main product as dynamic holiday packages, in which a customer puts together a flight, a hotel and extras in one booking.

How travel agencies present themselves.

Package-holiday operators and travel agencies sell something the customer cannot see before the trip, so the brand has to stand in for the holiday. In the shop era that meant printed brochures and the windows of high-street shops, filled with resort photographs and destination names. Online agencies moved the same job to booking pages, where search boxes, hotel photographs and a single package price do the work the brochure once did.

Television has been a second shop window. On the Beach aired its first TV advert in December 2013, a campaign filmed on Fuerteventura, according to English Wikipedia; loveholidays’ chief executive told City A.M. in 2024 that his company did not spend on TV advertising and leaned on social media and brand partnerships instead. Both approaches show the holiday rather than the company: sea, sand, pools and city streets.

Naming in the sector tends to be plain. Some brands describe the product or the destination, some carry a founder’s surname, and some are built to read as a web address. Holiday ranges and sub-brands are usually named for the kind of trip they sell, such as beach, city break, long haul or cruise, so a customer can tell them apart at a glance.

Corporate pages tell a different story from the booking pages: who founded the company and where, which investors have owned it, when it listed or was sold, and, for some firms in this set, when the business collapsed or was absorbed into another group. This guide sets out what dated sources record about each brand, and marks what rests only on the company’s own word.

From Sabre to the group that took its name.

Sabre put the business up for sale in 2014. In December that year The Guardian reported that Bravofly Rumbo, a European online travel agency set up in 2004 and focused on Italy, France and Spain, had agreed to buy it, with completion expected in the first quarter of 2015; English Wikipedia dates the takeover to 2015. During 2015 the buyer changed its own corporate name to lastminute.com, making the British brand the core of the group, English Wikipedia says. It went on to buy the hotel search site hotelscan in November 2017 and the German travel site weg.de in December 2017. Decision Marketing describes the buyer as Swiss-based, and the corporate site’s legal notice names lastminute.com NV, in Amsterdam.

The brand’s record includes a regulator’s action over refunds. In December 2020, after action by the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), lastminute.com agreed to pay all outstanding refunds for package holidays cancelled that year by the end of January 2021, the BBC reported in February 2021. The consumer group Which? said some customers had still not been fully refunded after the deadline; the CMA said the company had to report on how it was meeting its commitments, and that it would consider further action if they were not met. lastminute.com told the BBC the refund process had been very complex.

For a design guide, lastminute.com shows how a brand can be built on a name that is also an instruction and a web address, then carried by one strong colour. Compare eDreams, another European online travel agency, and loveholidays, an online package-holiday brand. For this guide we use a flamingo pink, deep plum and blush with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep lastminute.com’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.