Lastminute.com will face legal action unless it repays more than £1 million to customers

Lastminute.com will face legal action unless it repays more than £1 million to customers it committed to refund after their package holidays were cancelled, the competition watchdog has said.
The CMA made the announcement to the City this morning.The CMA made the announcement to the City this morning.
The CMA made the announcement to the City this morning.

In December, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced that lastminute.com had signed formal undertakings which committed it to pay out over £7 million to more than 9,000 customers when their holidays were cancelled due to the pandemic.

In a statement, the CMA said: "All those affected were due to get their money back by 31 January 2021 at the latest, however, lastminute.com still owes over £1 million to 2,600 customers.

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"The company has also failed to meet its ongoing commitment to repay all customers entitled to a refund within 14 days of their package holiday being cancelled on or after 3 December 2020.

"On top of this, lastminute.com told some package holiday customers to go directly to their airline to get the cost of their flight back. This is also in breach of its commitments and against its obligations under the Package Travel Regulations.

"The CMA has informed lastminute.com that it will take court action if it does not repay the outstanding refunds within 7 days. To avoid court action, lastminute.com must also ensure that customers who book their package holidays from now on will receive a full refund within 14 days where they are legally entitled to their money back following the cancellation of their package holiday."

Andrea Coscelli, Chief Executive of the CMA, said: "It is wholly unacceptable that thousands of lastminute.com customers are still waiting for full refunds for package holidays despite the commitments the company signed with us.

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"We take breaches of commitments extremely seriously. If lastminute.com does not comply with the law and pay people their outstanding refunds quickly, we will take the company to court."

In a statement, Lastminute.com said that it had refunded more than £40 million to customers, but still has £1.3 million pending.

“We sincerely apologise to all customers still waiting for their package holiday refunds and we are making every effort to resolve any remaining delays customers are facing,” said managing director Andrea Bertoli.

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