About Leonardo

Leonardo Zanarella is CTO at Alba Travel, one of Italy's oldest tour operators — serving 8,000+ physical travel agencies with hotels, flights, tours, insurance, and custom vertical products built in-house. He joined at the end of 2023 after COVID and internal technical setbacks, standardizing flows and rebuilding an internal software house to inject Alba's own tour, insurance, and experience products into the platform.

What we talked about

Assistance is the point of sale — Through COVID, wars, and rough years, Alba's layered backup support teams never let an agency down — trust beats lowest price every time.

Four AI bets, one cautious — Text-to-package creation, BI on 20 years of booking data, internal context LLM for problem-solving, and AI-drafted support replies humans still send.

BI drove 10%+ growth — AI-powered business intelligence on booking windows, cart paths, and margin timing has run for over a year with measurable revenue lift.

Customer support stays human — Agents answer faster than AI in high-stakes travel; the team prefers preparing answers over auto-sending — even when testers did not realize they chatted with AI.

Dynamic packaging rebuild — Migrating hotel-plus-flight-plus-insurance from monolith to microservices with price prediction to cut 40-second loads toward 20 seconds.

Agentic booking is not the threat — When something goes wrong in Cuba or Venice, human assistance and local judgment beat blog-trained AI itineraries.

Sharpest moments

On Alba's promise:

if I give you some money and something goes wrong, I know I can get my money back

On support AI limits:

support team prefer to answer themselves and the AI can prepare the answer but not yet substitute them.

On internal comms:

the internal communication is the base of any company

On never abandoning agencies:

we never let our customer down.

On BI impact:

allowed us to grow at least plus 10%

Key takeaways

• Alba Travel's moat is layered human assistance for 8,000 Italian agencies — technology supports, not replaces, that trust.
• AI package creation from natural language ("weekend in Paris from Rome in May") is live; mandatory insurance bundling is a Italy-specific edge.
• Internal Alba-context LLM solves communication problems by surfacing company knowledge before teams respond.
• Booking windows differ by product: ~92 days for hotel+flight packages, ~120 for tours, ~20 for activities — seasonality has flattened versus 2006–2010 peaks.
• South Asia demand spiked when Alba added vertical inventory — agencies only book what the platform already lists.
• Dynamic packaging latency pushes customers to book hotel, flight, and insurance separately — price prediction is the fix in progress.
• AI agents can book, but confidence and "what if" crisis support keep intermediaries relevant for years.