Never Again Lastminute.com

I booked a last-minute ticket from the US to Switzerland using a site that ironically calls itself lastminute. It was one of those spontaneous decisions where everything aligned perfectly except, of course, the ticket itself.

A little over 24 hours before departure, I was reviewing my itinerary when I noticed something off. The name on the reservation was flipped, last name where my first name should be, and vice versa. A small detail, sure but enough to ruin an international trip.

I jumped on their support chat immediately. The only phone number they list is a UK one. My fiancée tried reaching out from Europe, but no luck as no one picked up. So I explained the situation to the chat agent. They said a case was opened to fix the name.

Now, being Arab and (And as someone working with CUDA) has conditioned me to expect the worst when it comes to travel. It’s like a sixth sense—when things go wrong, they really go wrong. So I didn’t trust the process blindly. I called Delta, since the first leg of the trip was theirs (viva CVG), but they redirected me to Air France, the main carrier. Air France told me bluntly: the ticket was issued by a travel agency, so they couldn’t touch it. Only the agency could fix it.

So I went back to lastminute. Again. Multiple chats, same robotic replies. At some point I realized I wasn’t even talking to a human anymore. The responses had that uncanny, too-clean tone you only get from old-school bots or badly prompted LLMs. I think their system prompt include “deny everything politely.” It was like trying to reason with a gatekeeping oracle.

At this point, it was the night before the flight. I headed to the airport early in the morning (actually too early even by my standard), hoping someone could help in person. But then another glitch appeared. Delta’s system didn’t even show my first leg. It showed only the Air France segment from Paris to Geneva the next day. Absurd.

Delta agents at CVG were kind but confused. Meanwhile, I had completely lost faith that lastminute would help especially after they closed my case saying they contacted Air France and the airline refused to change the name due to their policy. That was a lie. Air France never got contacted by them and Air France asked me to tell lastminute to contact them directly to resolve this issue quickly and easily.

But then came the breakthrough. My fiancée, calling the German Air France office, finally reached someone. She explained everything, convinced them to get in touch with Delta, and brought clarity to their scrambled reservation system. The Delta staff at CVG now had everything, the full paper trail, travel docs, explanation of the name mismatch and with their help, Air France agreed to make an exception. The name was fixed.

So all it would have taken was for lastminute to contact Air France. Just one email. One phone call. Instead, they gave up. Lied. And left me dangling until I had to solve everything myself at the last possible moment.

Never again lastminute.