Lastminute.com holidays have seen a rise in its number of bookings since unveiling a new virtual travel agent booking engine. The innovative booking engine, nicknamed ‘Judith’ after holiday presenter Judith Chalmers, is able to maintain a customer’s selected requirements throughout the booking and provides a weather feature to search for destinations according to their climate. Lastminute.com customers can also select attributes of the resort such as a sandy beach, water sports facilities, good shopping and sites of historical interest. Lastminute’s holiday search results are based on historic information, which means the products are relevant and appeal to the customer’s holiday requirements.
‘Judith’ at Lastminute.com also attempts to anticipate customers’ next moves, giving information on refining search results that are either priced too high or too low. Following the change to Lastminute’s site, there is also a wider variety of products available with Lastminute now offering a wider range of holidays for families, single holidays and activity or themed holidays.
Lastminute.com Travel Director, John Bevan said “Judith is the result of months of research and planning to make sure that we would create the best holiday search engine...It is like a virtual online travel agent, extremely clever and it can anticipate customers’ next moves, point them in the right direction to find the perfect and most suitable holiday in terms of type of holiday, price, dates, airport departure, destination and hotel.” Lastminute.com reported a record week for sales recently as their booking numbers more than doubled.
