lastminute.com's New Travel Report Says Europeans Are Using AI to 'Holiday Max'

lastminute.com Group released a new research report this week, Travel Horizons, identifying what it calls "holiday maxing" as a defining trend in how European travelers are planning trips: using AI tools to stretch a fixed travel budget or a limited number of days off as far as possible.

The idea is straightforward. Rather than picking a destination and then working out logistics, travelers described in the report are using AI to compare options quickly, flights, dates, destinations, and squeeze more value or more distinct experiences out of the same money and time. lastminute.com frames this as evolving consumer behavior across Europe rather than a single feature or product launch, and the company has made a full English-language version of the report available as a download alongside the announcement.

Read with the right skepticism

This is a company-commissioned trend report released by an OTA that has spent the past year publicly building out its own AI capabilities, including an AI-powered transformation announced in June 2026 and an MCP server for flights launched in January. A report from lastminute.com finding that European travelers are enthusiastically using AI to plan trips is, unsurprisingly, a finding that supports the direction the company has already committed to. That doesn't make the underlying behavior untrue, "holiday maxing" as a concept lines up with broader, independently observed trends toward AI-assisted trip planning, but the specific framing, terminology and emphasis should be read as marketing-adjacent research rather than neutral third-party data. The report doesn't appear to disclose sample size, methodology, or survey dates in what's been made public so far.

What it means for operators

If AI-assisted planning really is becoming a default behavior for a meaningful share of European travelers, independent hotels and short-term rental operators should expect guests to arrive having already run comparison searches across multiple options before booking, with more of the initial decision-making happening inside an AI tool rather than on a property's own website or listing page. That raises the stakes for how well a property's information, rates, availability, amenities, is represented in the data these tools actually pull from, since a traveler who's already "holiday maxed" their way to a shortlist may never see a listing that isn't well represented there in the first place.