This report of Parlez with Paul with Brent Hoberman CBE is written by Justyn Barnes. The webinar took place on 24 February 2025.
Paul Richer welcomed Brent Hoberman CBE, Co-Founder and former CEO of lastminute.com, the founding father of online travel agencies, to the latest Parlez with Paul webinar on 24 February. A delayed flight meant that Paul was forced to conduct the first part of the interview from a cab (with a little help from new TTI chairman Jon Pickles when Paul’s 5G signal cut out!), but the conversation flowed as Hoberman recalled the incredible lastminute.com story.
Hoberman had had the idea for lastminute two or three years before doing anything with it because, he said: “I wasn’t ready and the internet wasn’t ready,” but once he picked it up again in 1997, things moved very fast.
“I persuaded Martha Lane-Fox [a former colleagues at media strategy consultants Spectrum] to join me,” he recalled. “She and I wrote the business plan in about six weeks, sent it off to 20 relatively random people and within six more weeks five of them had agreed to fund it. We launched in October 1998, about nine months after the fund-raise, then went public in March 2000 after just 18 months, quicker than any company in Europe had ever done so.”
Acquiring the last-minute inventory their revolutionary business depended on required “a bit of bluff and bluster” admitted Hoberman. However, telling major airlines that lastminute would effectively be their R&D partners in testing the internet as a way to sell travel, persuaded the likes of British Airways to “give us special deals they didn’t give to companies a thousand times our size…. We did similar things across hotels and restaurants. People wanted to learn about the new medium.”
Hoberman’s company had to overcome major challenges that seem unimaginable today: “We were in the days of dial-up modems and very expensive technology that didn’t work. All the time I would be doing mock transactions on the website to try and make it work, and it would fail a lot. But the customers were tolerant because: a) the deals were extraordinary; and b) it was new and exciting.”
Paul recalled seeing lastminute.com everywhere back in those early years and asked whether they had a huge marketing budget?
“Not as big as you’d think,” said Hoberman. “We were guerilla marketeers. I used to say to our marketing directors: ‘If you get arrested, I know you are doing your job properly.’
“We were the first dotcom to advertise on London buses which grabbed people’s attention. BAA invested in us, and as part of the investment deal we got free advertising at Heathrow for a year in return for inventing new ad mediums: advertising on the sliding entrance doors, ‘Drop everything. Do something lastminute.com’ messaging on the key trays at security, those sorts of things.”
Lastminute also created innovative products. He talked proudly about their hugely successful ‘Top Secret Hotels’, offering an unidentified hotel in a given location at a bargain price: “You make higher margins as the seller, the customer gets 70% off and loves you and is loyal to you, you get cash up front and only pay it later – it was a beautiful thing.”
Lastminute was also ahead of its time when offering voice recognition to buy hotel rooms through its database way back in 2000.
“We also did restaurant food delivery,” he recalled wistfully. “Just Eat saw us as a competitor in 2001, but my chairman thought food delivery was a terrible idea. Just Eat was sold for about £4 billion today, so maybe I should have just done that rather than low-margin travel!”
Since lastminute.com was sold to Sabre in 2005 for $1.1bn, Hoberman co-founded Made.com in 2010, leaving the business when it went public in 2021 at a valuation of $1.1 billion. He is currently Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of Founders Factory (global venture studios, seed programmes and accelerator programmes), Founders Forum (global community of founders, corporates and tech leaders), and firstminute capital (a global $320m seed fund).
Looking back, is there anything he would have done differently at lastminute? “One thing I learned in my last two years there, but wish I’d learnt earlier, is to put your smartest people on the most boring tasks, because they will work out ways to use technology to do that work more efficiently.”
And if he was to launch a new travel business in 2025 what would it be? “The honest answer is I wouldn’t because of the low margins! But if I did, I would go super-premium, catering to the 0.1%, but with much better technology. If someone is going to drop 50 grand on a safari, give them incredible tools to show them what to expect before they go.”
“Travel captures the imagination. And it’s an enormous industry with friction that is ripe for automation. A next-gen call centre could come from the travel industry, because the queries in travel are complex and technology now has the potential to solve them. I still find those sorts of businesses very exciting.”