Lastminute - from airport booking to internet portals
The term lastminute has its origin in the 1980er years in Germany and other german speaken countries. It was introduced by the DRV (Deutschen Reisebüro und Reiseveranstalter Verband e.V.). It does not originate from the english language area like many german people think. If someone speaks in English about last minute, nobody will understand what is really meant. But what means the term lastminute exactly in germany? In the past the term last minute was used by airline companies. If they had free places for a flight in the near future they offered them for cheaper prices. Because the internet wasn´t available in such a form like today, it was only possible to book directly at the airports. Lastminute flights brought large success to the airline companies, so it lasted not long and the other travel industries spread also into the lastminute market. From now on the tour operators promoted package tours, summer residences as well as hotels. At this times it was still not possible to book in the internet. Nearly none of the tour operators had an internet page yet. If you wanted to get a good lastminute offer you had to go to the the airport, and had to have a look on the price labels at the counters. With the internet boom the term continued to expand again. Nowadays, there are uncountable internet portals on which you can book journeys comfortably online from home. Today it is so, that a journey can be called last minute if departure is within the next 14 days. Actually you would´t call this "lastminute" any longer. Some tour operators have even used the term lastminute for journeys with departure in 6 weeks or more. Since the travelers associated the term last minute with favourable prices, it didn´t took long until the travel companies got accused of distortion of competition. From that moment it was only allowed to talk about lastminute if the departure of a yourney is in the next 2 weeks. Otherwise the travel industrie has to call their offers "lastminute & more". It it interesting to see, that the travel behavior of the travellers have totaly changed since lastminute travel offers were introduced. The trend changed over from the early reservation to the lastminute booking. For the travel companies this had become a huge problem. They had problems to plan their capacities, so they decided to offer special deals for travellers who book very early. Some travel companies have abolished their complete lastminute deals. It is interesting to see how an english term (which doesn´t exist in the english language in that meaning) is used in Germany. Further Informations about lastminute are to be found also here: