lastminute.com
will offer travel agents and consumers its widest ever choice of air fares and routings following a major deal with Gateway, Europe’s leading air fares management company.

ÊThe agreement sees Gateway taking responsibility for loading all of lastminute.com’s negotiated UK scheduled fares, from over 90 different airlines.ÊÊ

Agents booking through lastminute.com or its trade portal holidayandmore.com will enjoy access to around 3,000 fares each week from carriers including Lufthansa, Virgin Atlantic and American Airlines. This will enable them to source and book the latest product from airlines who are constantly releasing new rates into Europe’s volatile air market.

Gateway is responsible for processing promotional fares, guaranteeing these deals are available to agents more quickly than elsewhere in the market.

Graham Townsley, lastminute.com airline account manager said: “The extent of lastminute.com’s contracts with carriers creates a vast number of fares and routings for us to handle.Ê

“When we decided to update our nett fare database and loading technology, we explored the outsource options and Gateway offered the best service and solution as well as an attractive price proposition.”

Valere Vandecruys, Gateway managing director said: “Advanced technology and data processing techniques in the air sector is enabling agents to instantly offer their customers a far wider choice of fares and routings.Ê

“Outsourcing air fare management is now saving companies across the industry the cost of maintaining their own fares databases, and means they can cope with the sheer rate of change in the highly volatile European air sector. As a result the outsourced air fare management market is set to explode.”

Gateway’s unique two-fold data entry technique sees all fares entered by two people and manually crosschecked to ensure accuracy.

The company has won over 1400 customers, from travel agents and consolidators to airlines, across 11 European countries including the UK, Germany and France.
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