bargainholidays.com appears to have shut down!

[vicdigi]

It would appear that the popular holiday booking website with over 7000 backlinks (part of the lastminute.com group of travel websites) has shut down.

Traffic to the site over the last few months has decreased although I cannot see why this would be cause for any concern.

No explanation has thus far been given by lastminute.com and this remains difficult to understand why they would close the site considering all the free traffic the website receives from all search engines!

[espmartin]

Here's the reason:

1. Why have you closed Bargainholidays?
   lastminute.com has an extended family of brands (23 in total) that offer our customers some of the widest choices of products possible. From holidays to hotels, car hire to business travel, ferry crossings to ski breaks, our brands specialise in providing all the travel options you'll ever need.
   An evaluation of our portfolio showed duplication across some of our brands so we have taken the decision to consolidate a few of our smaller niche brands to ensure a more focused offering to our customers.
   As a company we are committed to continually offering our customers the widest choice of products and the best customer service possible.
   To find out more about our brand portfolio, please visit the 'about us' pages of our lastminute.com website.
   

[temi]

Yes, lastminute.com bought and awful lot of smaller holidays sites a few years back, its just does not make sense keeping that many smaller sites when you have a big brand like lastminute.com

[vicdigi]

How much you reckon for the domain? I'd put every penny into starting a real holiday busines and more out of that.

[temi]

I have a felling they will not sell it, they will just point the domain to their main website or any of their website that is likely to benefit most from the kind of traffic that site generates.

[vicdigi]

I think they have made a great mistake. The homepage at the very least should have been optimised / more content and keyword to keep it in the frame for the keyword search engine results it receives.

Whilst I understand this needs to be clear for their visitors, it could have been added using other methods (not blackhat seo though).

This would at least hold them on good stead for a while longer.

I see their group of websites are still linking to bargainholidays.com !

[temi]

Vic,
For a small webmaster like you and I, it will appear they have made a mistake.... but the group that bought lastminute.com from the two founders paid about 1 billion pounds. I do not think a company that can come up with that kind of money will miss bargainholidays.com much.
Maybe you should put a domain stalker on bargainholidays.com in case they forget to renew it when it come up for renewal, it could be yours for only $50 or so. Microsoft once forgot to renew hotmail.com a few years back

[vicdigi]

Mate, I am that stalker. Sabre Holdings (owners of Travelocity) bought out Lastminute with its entire portfolio a couple years back for a little over £500 million.

[temi]

Yes, you are right, about 1 billion dollars I meant to say rather than I billion pounds. Go ahead and place a stalker on that domain, you may get lucky