LastMinuteTravel.com

lastminutetravel.com

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Is LastMinuteTravel.com legitimate?

Traveling has been one of the greatest joys of my life. I don’t think it would be hyperbolic to say that it has been the singular greatest joy. I have been fortunate enough to travel a lot. Having gone around the entire world twice over, calling myself lucky would be an understatement. And do you know what the crazy thing is? Even though I have spent years and years doing nothing but traveling everywhere and anywhere I could go, somehow it never gets old.

I love every aspect of traveling – from the rush that comes with planning my trip to the wild adventures that I go on when I get to my destinations. Although making vacation plans over a long period of time can be great fun. Slowly ramping up the anticipation over weeks on end is, for many, one of the enjoyable parts of taking a trip. Watching everything slowly materialize as you choose and book your hotel or room, buy your flight tickets, and start to plan your itinerary becomes almost part of the vacation itself. Imagining the trip and concretizing it before you depart can be nothing short of thrilling.

If you are anything like me, though, perhaps planning ahead is not necessarily your thing. I have always been an incredibly impulsive person. Some of the best trips that I’ve gone on have been on a whim. There have been days where I’ve woken up in the United States and went to bed in Europe, having not the slightest idea in the morning that I would be doing anything at all!

Even if spontaneous travel isn’t quite up your alley, sometimes last-minute travel is inevitable. Maybe your boss sends you on an unexpected business trip abroad. Maybe a family emergency requires you to travel across the country at a moment’s notice. Maybe you have finally heard back from that dream job and you have to hop on a plane to make the interview in a couple days. Whether for business or pleasure, last minute traveling doesn’t have to be a burden. In fact, sometimes it can be even more affordable than planning your trip months ahead of time – so long as you have the right lastminutetravel.com site on your side.

A lot of would-be last-minute travelers find spontaneous travel to be intimidating. For good reason. There is a great deal of mystery surrounding when the best time to start booking flights and hotels is. For example, are you better off buying plane tickets a year out, or taking your chances flying stand by?

Even though people often say that booking ahead of time is much cheaper, that is not always the case. A great deal of destinations (particularly warm, beachy ones) come with seasonal prices that are set long in advance. This is true of both flight prices and hotel bookings. Let’s say you are looking to visit Florida in December. It doesn’t matter how far in advance you book your flight it is always going to be more expensive than if you were to go to Florida in, say, July or August. So, taking a last-minute, impulsive trip to Florida in August actually may not be that expensive, it turns out.

Flight and hotel prices, however, are not always so static. In fact, they are extremely volatile, constantly fluctuating between higher and lower prices, sometimes as frequently as every few minutes. So, if you are the kind of person who, like me, is inclined to impulsive travel, I have some tips that I’ve learned over the years for you to take with you moving forward.

The first thing that you’re going to want to do is keep a few places that you’d really like to go to in mind. Chances are, this won’t take any effort at all. I bet you could probably list your top 3 destinations right now without even thinking about it if pressed. Once you have chosen your ideal getaway spots, set up alerts on your favorite flight booking websites. Sites such as lastminutetravel.com are literally made to make your life easier and alert you of the best flight deals the second that they become available.

But is the aptly titled lastminutetravel.com, in fact, the best site on the web for finding last minute travel deals? Well, that is going to depend on quite a few factors. The only way to find out for sure is to delve into the site, exploring every feature and seeing what kinds of deals Last Minute Travel has to offer.

lastminutetravel.com doesn’t offer quite as many booking options as some of its competitors, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes it is better when a site only provides a few services and does a really good job at doing so. I don’t know about you, but I would much rather have a travel site that only hooks me up with the best, most affordable flight and hotel deals than a travel site that tries to do connect users with every thing you could imagine ever needing to make your trip a reality – especially if quantity of services comes at the cost of quality (as it so often does).

In addition to providing the best last minute flight and hotel listings, lastminutetravel.com also contains thousands of listings of rental cars, activities, and shuttles available all around the world. It is a simple and straightforward site. If you are looking for last minute travel deals, perhaps there is no better site for you than Lastminutetravel.com. Makes sense, right?

How does LastMinuteTravel.com website look like?

 I cannot stress to you enough how much I love lastminutetravel.com’s site design. It is elegant, it is sharp, and it is minimalistic in all the best ways. Travel sites, in my experience, frequently suffer from an issue of clutter. This is natural, seeing as most travel sites offer several (sometimes dozens) very content-heavy services. It is no easy task to take a sprawling list of flight and hotel prices and information and turn it into a sleek, sparse site.

lastminutetravel.com, however, has managed to do just that. I think that the site makes brilliant use of panels and images to streamline content. Whereas a lot of travel sites tend to be largely text based, lastminutetravel.com presents itself with a lot of white space, nice and clean lines, and beautiful high-resolution images of destinations, hotels, and more.

My only complaint regarding the design of lastminutetravel.com is the fact that it doesn’t seem to offer as many filtering options as I’ve seen elsewhere. You can filter flight search results, for instance, by number of stops, duration, times, carriers, and layover airports. Perhaps this is a gripe not so much with the site design as it is a feature oversight. I would like to see a few more filtering and arrangement options from lastminutetravel.com in the future.

How does LastMinuteTravel.com work?

 But let’s discuss the features that lastminutetravel.com does have going for it, shall we? To break it down, lastminutetravel.com is a metasearch engine that lets users search for affordable flights, hotels, car rentals, activities, and shuttle transfers from thousands of different companies, airlines, etc. Last Minute Travel is most comparable to Kiwi because, well, their search engine is powered by Kiwi.com.

In addition to finding great deals on last minute flights, hotels, and more, lastminutetravel.com also has a regularly updated blog with articles on travel, self-improvement, and other lifestyle topics. Discover a new destination to add your list of places to keep tabs on by reading up on some exciting trips and ways to see the world.

Unfortunately, though, speaking of keeping an eye on your favorite locations for the most affordable last minute trip, it doesn’t appear as if (from what I can see at least) that lastminutetravel.com allows users to create alerts or track locations. This is a glaringly missing feature, if you ask me, for a site that props itself up as the lastminutetravel.com site.

Does LastMinuteTravel.com have an App?

 The lastminutetravel.com mobile app is every bit as smooth, user-friendly, and sleek as the desktop site. Available on both Android and iOS devices, the app makes finding the best last minute travel deals quick and easy, no matter where in the world you may be.

 Pros

 -User-friendly, intuitive site and app design

-Travel Club members get exclusive discounts

-Simple and effective search results

-Live chat with travel agent

Cons

 -Not enough filtering/arranging options of listings

-No price tracking or alerts system

Pros
  • Exclusive benefits via their free smartphone app
  • Simple and effective search results
  • A secret hotel scheme can help save 65% on bookings
  • Live online chat with a travel agent
  • Travel Club members get exclusive discounts
  • The user-friendly, intuitive site and app design
Cons
  • The amount of information can feel overwhelming
  • Not enough filtering/arranging options of listings
  • No price tracking or alerts system