Spanish tourism's first big AI layoff
On 18 June 2026, Lastminute Group presented unions with a collective layoff plan affecting 163 people at Rumbo, its brand in Spain, based in Madrid. That is 34% of the group's Spanish workforce. The figure is part of a worldwide adjustment of around 25% of total staff with which the company estimates an annual saving of 16 million euros from 2027 onward.
This is not the first time the Spanish tourism sector has cut staff. It is the first time a large company has linked it, with a name and a figure, to its shift toward artificial intelligence: the company speaks of accelerating its transition toward an AI-supported operation, and in July its CEO told analysts it is integrating its MCP server so that its flights and hotels can be booked from Claude and ChatGPT. That is why this layoff plan, and not another one, is the one marking a before and after in the sector's conversation.
What the numbers say, and what they don't
At the table, unions asked for 38 days per year worked, capped at 24 months' pay, and a year of outplacement support; the company's latest published offer was 33 days, the same cap and six months of outplacement with Randstad. Of the 163 positions initially proposed, 20 came out of the plan in the first rounds.
There is a second cause that gets cited far less than AI, and it is worth putting on the table because it changes how the case reads. Lastminute closed the second quarter of 2026 with 7 million euros in losses, versus 1.3 million in profit in the same quarter of 2025. Quarterly revenue fell 2%, to 91.4 million, adjusted EBITDA dropped 23%, and operating result was negative by 9.3 million. The company has cut its guidance for the year: from expected growth of around 10% in revenue and EBITDA to "mid-single-digit" revenue growth and adjusted EBITDA growth of between 5% and 10%.
That a loss-making company announces layoffs while investing in AI is not a contradiction — it is almost a pattern. AI provides narrative cover for an adjustment that, without it, would have to be explained solely by a bad quarter. Neither cause cancels out the other: both are probably true at once, and separating the story of technological transformation from an adjustment driven by financial results is, honestly, the hardest part of reading this news well.
Not an isolated case, though it is the largest with a public figure
A few weeks earlier, in May, Quadrant Travel Technologies, the technology platform for travel agencies launched by Pangea with other investors, announced a staff restructuring that it explicitly linked to its bet on artificial intelligence. The announcement does not include published figures, so it remains a qualitative precedent rather than a comparable data point.
Outside Spain, Expedia cut staff in January 2026 without confirming an official figure, coinciding with the appointment of its first Chief AI Officer; the company framed it as "eliminating roles and opening new roles" while it simultaneously posted more than 250 openings, and it did not tie the adjustment to AI in any official statement. It is a different pattern from Lastminute's — selective restructuring with simultaneous hiring, not a net cut — and it is worth not lumping it together with the Spanish case as if they were the same story.
After the Rumbo layoffs came two more cases outside Spain. In July 2026, hotel management software company Mews laid off 15% of its roughly 1,350 employees, and its CEO, Richard Valtr, attributed it to AI: as he told Skift, a single person can now handle from start to finish work that used to pass through several specialists. In August 2026, Expedia removed eight senior technology executives and reorganised its product and technology division, around 8,000 people, into small teams that each own a product end to end; the company stressed there is no evidence that AI replaced those executives. In September, an official layoff notice filed with Washington State added 58 more roles in Seattle, more than half of them technical. In neither case does AI explain the cuts on its own: it comes alongside a broader reorganisation, just as at Lastminute.
The split screen behind closed doors: fear on the shop floor, fever in the boardroom
Months before Lastminute's layoff plan, the trade press was already documenting internal tension at the big Spanish tour operators that helps explain why this news made so much noise. In February 2026, there was talk of widespread fear among staff at the head offices of the large groups — concentrated in administrative roles, the most easily automated — while the top management was living through what was described as an "unprecedented fever" to adopt the latest generative AI versions. Two speeds, one building: whoever signs the layoff plan and whoever suffers it are reading the same technology in opposite ways.
That tension is not unique to tourism or to Spain, but here it has names: Lastminute/Rumbo is, as of this publication, the largest and most cited case with a figure attached. It will not be the last — once a large company in the sector normalises linking layoffs to AI in its own communications, the next ones do it with less reputational friction.
My take, after fifteen years in operations at a tour operator
The question that never fails to come up in a restructuring is always the same: is this the technology, or is it the balance sheet? It is almost always both, and whoever is leading the adjustment has every incentive for the public answer to be "the technology" — it sounds like strategy, not distress.
If you run a small or medium-sized tourism business, the useful lesson is not fear of the headline. It is more boring and more applicable: AI really does cut down the repetitive tasks of booking management, incident handling and after-sales support — there are real Spanish cases, such as Ávoris resolving more than 70% of its incidents with an agent built on Azure OpenAI. But replacing staff with AI without first cleaning up processes and data does not save money, it postpones the cost. And training for the people who stay — the innovation budget line that has lost the most weight at travel agencies, from 59% to 46% according to the 2026 Beroni and ObservaTUR barometer — is exactly the opposite of what this moment calls for.
Lastminute's layoff plan does not close a debate. It opens one, with a name and a figure, in a Spanish sector that until now had only talked about AI in the abstract.
