Dead lastminute.com - the full(ish) story

So last Friday we revealed how lastminute.com and a string of sister sites had seemingly disappeared off the face of the earth.

It actually turned out to be a pretty serious problem, as our story today indicates.

The sites - including Medhotels, Holiday Autos and Travelocity.co.uk, as well as the Tesco.com white label - remained offline until 2am on Saturday morning, over ten hours after the "power outage" at IT supplier Colt took place.

We have only limited information about the circumstances surrounding the problem but questions will certainly be asked of Colt, no doubt about it.

Some might translate "we're working with our provider Colt to ensure this doesn't happen again", to actually be code for "we're going tear strips off these guys after our sites went dark for over 10 hours on one of the busiest days of the year!" - but probably not.

Anyway, it's a tricky area to analyse as it is completely impossible to monitor every travel site on the web to gauge how often something like this happens.

It was only good fortune that we saw the dead LM last Friday afternoon and stuck around until the wee hours of the following morning to see when it returned. We actually gave up at 1am and went to bed!

So, how common is the problem? What do travel companies do in a situation like this? Apart from panic.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Travolution Autumn Conf: Making car hire interesting

"Hands up who got excited about their last holiday?" asks Stuart Nassos, managing director UK and Ireland, Holiday Autos.

Hands go up.

"Keep your hand up if you got excited about your car hire experience."

Hands go down.

A brave start. Stuart is honest about the challenges of the market - brand loyalty only exists in as far as that consumers won't use you again if you 'screw it up', and the purchase is far from emotive.

Stuart says the key to capturing consumers is simplifying the purchase - which means being in the right place at the right time - and added value, which could be:

• Maps, destination guides
• User-friendly presentation of T&Cs and insurance documentation
• Carbon offsetting
• Editorial (e.g. blogs)

In other words, do your level best - and use all the channels at your disposal - to make a traditionally uninteresting transaction more three-dimensional. See also Jilly Welch's comments about data entry and travel sites earlier...

Nathan Midgley