About Fabio

Fabio Cannavale is founder of Lastminute.com Travel Group and investment firm Be Heroes. He co-founded volagratis in 2003, scaled through BravoFly, IPO'd in 2014, and acquired lastminute.com — a group now trading on three exchanges with roughly four billion in gross travel value. From a sailing boat in the Pacific, he shares three decades of lessons on AI, personalization, and surviving the next wave of change.

What we talked about

From low-cost flights to curated packages — How Lastminute evolved from connecting flights and hotels into a licensed tour operator across 15–20 countries — beach holidays, city breaks, transfers, and experiences — without owning assets.

Personalization vs. scale — Why bespoke travel is in demand but hard to scale, and why the real frontier is turning what AI prepares for a user into a complete, bookable itinerary tailored to them.

AI knows you — and OTAs don't — Fabio's core challenge: ChatGPT and Claude already know your family, preferences, and recent trips. A travel company rarely has that depth of personal context.

AI as the new traffic channel — Lastminute is connecting to AI engines this month — treating them like the Google of the future while still handling booking fulfillment and customer service.

Post-COVID meets the AI wave — Four days in-office to rebuild culture, but a split workforce: early AI adopters in finance and admin vs. developers who insist agents can't match their code.

The oxygen strategy — When teams shrink from 20 to 10, work still gets done. Fabio argues European companies must adapt fast or lose to US competitors already cutting 15–20% of headcount annually.

Reinvesting AI savings into marketing — Variable operations costs drop ~10% per year through AI automation; gains flow into brand, loyalty, and customer experience as technology becomes harder to differentiate.

Sharpest moments

On the pace of AI change:

AI is something that is doubling the capacity every four months. It means that the capacity of AI increased 10 times per year.

On AI as a distribution channel:

the AI will be, I'd say, the Google for traffic company of the future.

On the personalization gap:

if today I go to my own AI, they know my family, what they like, the kind of hotel we like, where we've been in the last

On operational savings:

every year we reduce costs about 10 % thanks to the AI

On headcount and productivity:

a company of Las Minas like Las Minas that today has 1800 people. probably can be managed by 100 people.

On mass tourism vs. authentic travel:

people are a little bit fed up to do all the same stuff. And so they want to do something different.

Key takeaways

• Lastminute's moat is shifting from reliable package delivery to curated, personalized travel — the right hotel for you, not just a working booking.
• AI engines will drive discovery traffic; OTAs still win on licenses, operations, and customer service — big tech won't become travel agencies.
• Personal context is the hardest data problem: your AI assistant knows you better than any OTA's CRM ever will.
• Variable costs fall ~10% annually through AI in payments and customer care; savings reinvested in marketing and brand as tech advantages erode.
• Organizational survival means forcing adaptation — "taking the oxygen" — not letting teams coast on AI productivity gains as free time.
• A 1,800-person travel company could run on ~100; greenfield startups might need only 10–20 with agent-first infrastructure.
• Mass tourism pushes travelers off the beaten track — AI makes authentic local experiences more accessible.