Lastminute.com is replacing human curation with AI across its packaging stack
A 25% workforce reduction funds the shift — and changes how hotel inventory gets selected and priced on the platform
Driving the news. Lastminute.com announced on June 17 that it will cut approximately 25% of its workforce across multiple countries by the end of 2026. The company expects annual cost savings of roughly €16 million from 2027, with capital redeployed into data infrastructure and specialized AI expertise. The announcement, made from Amsterdam and Chiasso, describes the restructuring as establishing "the structural conditions" for the group's transition into an AI-powered travel company, accelerating AI deployment across customer-facing applications and core workflows simultaneously. Reductions will be conducted in consultation with employee representatives under local regulations in each affected country.
The context. Lastminute.com is a dynamic packaging OTA — its core product is real-time assembly of flight-hotel combinations using proprietary technology, operating across more than 35 countries under brands including Bravofly, Volagratis, Jetcost, and Hotelscan. The operational layer being reduced is the human layer that currently sits between inventory supply and packaged product: workflow management, campaign execution, content curation, and the manual processes connecting reservation systems to customer-facing offers. That layer is being replaced by automated systems. The €16 million in annual savings is not being extracted from the business; it is being redirected into the model infrastructure that replaces the work.
What it means for hotels. Hotels that distribute through lastminute.com do so as suppliers into a packaging channel, not as listed properties on a straightforward agency model. Dynamic packaging means the platform assembles combinations algorithmically — selecting which properties enter a package, at what price point, and with what positioning relative to competing inventory. When that assembly is driven by human curation, supplier relationships, content quality, and account management have direct influence on inclusion. When it is driven by AI, the selection criteria shift. Structured data determines candidacy: machine-readable inventory, consistent pricing signals, reliable availability feeds, and content an automated system can parse and price against. Hotels with clean data infrastructure are better candidates for algorithmic inclusion than those without it. Hotels whose distribution data is fragmented, inconsistently structured, or dependent on manual processes sit at a growing disadvantage in channels that no longer have a human layer to compensate for the gaps.
The number. €16 million is the annual cost of the human layer lastminute.com is replacing. That figure now funds the model that decides which hotels get packaged.
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