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The incredible flood of interest in online gambling, and the huge potential revenues it can generate, has seen a tidal wave of online casinos opening on the Internet from companies previously unconnected with the casino world. Lastminute.com is one of the latest high-profile companies to extend its services into this crowded arena, but is its casino a clever adjunct to the core travel business it’s known for, or has it left it too last minute and missed the boat on this venture? Lastminute.com, brainchild of Internet darlings Brent Hoberman and Martha Lane Fox, has certainly built a strong commercial reputation through its travel services which inspires confidence to spend money there, but we’re curious to see if its casino fits the company’s aspiration to ‘become the number one European e-commerce lifestyle player by delighting our customers with great-value inspiration and solutions’ We certainly hope it’s not as toe-curling and clunky as the corporate-jargon of that mission statement!
To be brutally honest, first impressions ofwere disappointing. A quick check that we hadn’t got out of bed the wrong side in the morning confirmed our worst fears - we weren’t being unduly grouchy; the website was that uninspiring. The design was at best bland, with a layout we found pretty clumsy especially a centre page promotional banner loading in such a way as to obscure another advert on the page. We really don’t expect such sloppy online presentation from a firm that’s often championed for its online savvy. Things were salvaged a little by the clear ‘getting started’ information and thorough ‘casino help’ which easily cover most beginners’ queries and handhold novices through the process of registration to playing its online casino for the first time.
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The casino games themselves come courtesy of St. Minver – a name more associated with online Bingo gaming – and are exclusively ‘Instant Play’, i.e. no bespoke software needs to be downloaded and installed to play this casino. A positive aspect of this approach is thatis happy to play with a much wider range of PCs, so casino fans who have rejected the tyranny of Windows operating systems can join in the action. The potential downside is that the reproduction of the real-world casino games the software emulates is not as rich and detailed as ‘download casino’ software like the Cryptologic suite. To be fair the St. Minver gamesuses load pretty quickly and play perfectly well; we just wish there were more of them! This is perhaps the true Achilles’ heel of– at the time of review there were barely over twenty games on offer, with only one Video Poker machine, no progressive jackpots and no Craps. We assume this situation will improve, but for now the lack of choice and absence of several popular table games offered elsewhere can only disappoint players who’ve experienced the delights at rival UK online casinos.
Staying with the games, it was nice to see pretty thrifty bet limits but we did find the way they were advertised at the virtual gaming tables a little odd. Chips are shown in currency denominations, such as 25p. £1 etcetera, but bet limits and bet history are expressed as units – we initially did a double-take at the Blackjack table when we saw a minimum bet of ‘100’ and maximum of ‘100,000’, then realised it translated to £1 and £1000. It’s not a big issue, but it does make the games feel less refined. Another gripe related to the overall finesse of the gaming experience was finding that hitting the help button on the Sic Bo game redirected us to the preview page for Roulette! Call us old-fashioned but we were kind of expecting to see rules and tips about a Chinese dice game, not a hint, however unintentional, that we should be playing something else.
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does offer promotions to tempt new real-money players and these are fine, if not exceptional, however we’re surprised that there hasn’t been more effort to build promotions around other Lastminute.com services. Casino gaming and travel do make happy partners and Lastminute.com could do well to consider offering its members non-cash incentives along the lines of rival Virgin Casino, for example.
Customer support is available by phone and email around the clock and was the one areacompared very favourably with the best online Casinos we’ve tried, being both quick and efficient when we tried it.
Click here to play at Lastminute Casino now
We can only hope that Lastminute.com is a work in progress. It does offer reasonably thrifty wagering, but at the end of our review period we can’t say we felt overwhelmed by a sense of this ‘European e-commerce lifestyle player’ (whatever that gobbledygook actually means) delighting us with its ‘inspiration and solutions’. The games could use a bit more polish and should offer a lot more choice if they are to compete with the best ‘Instant Play’ online casinos we’ve played, while the website needs a serious makeover in our opinion. We’re sure existing Lastminute.com customers might enjoy the convenience of popping into its online casino for the odd flutter while booking a weekend break to Riga or tickets for ‘The Sound of Music’, however, in its current incarnation, we can’t honestly recommend it for more dedicated online casino players. Lastminute.com just doesn’t have what it takes yet to be considered a ‘first call’ online casino.
Click here to play at Lastminute Casino now |
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