ENGINEERING EFFORTLESS TRAVEL
Mirco Patroncini on Technology, Scale, and the Future of lastminute.com
With a career shaped by hands-on problem-solving, entrepreneurship, and large-scale digital transformation, Mirco Patroncini brings a distinctive perspective to the role of Chief Technology Officer at lastminute.com. In this conversation, he shares how technology underpins seamless, personalised travel experiences, the leadership principles guiding high-performing teams, and how data, AI, and resilient platforms are redefining what modern travel technology looks like. From scaling global infrastructure to building a true digital travel companion, Mirco offers a candid view into the mindset and priorities shaping the next chapter of online travel.
Professional Journey
Can you walk us through your career path and share what ultimately led you to your position as Chief Technology Officer at lastminute.com?
I probably don’t fit the usual profile of a CTO, and my path here hasn’t been linear, but I believe that journey has given me a much more rounded perspective. Before finding my place in technology, I worked as a plumber, a founder, and even in door-to-door sales. Those experiences taught me how to listen, solve problems quickly, and handle rejection — skills that are surprisingly essential in a CTO role.
My technical journey began by building computers and understanding systems from the ground up. That foundation led me into entrepreneurship, where I founded and ran my own company, before moving into enterprise technology at YOOX-Net-a-Porter Group. There, I worked on scaling cloud and e-commerce infrastructure for one of luxury retail’s digital pioneers.
I joined lastminute.com more than eight years ago, initially leading Platform Engineering, then Product Engineering, before stepping into the CTO role in 2024. Alongside my Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the Università di Bologna, I’ve continued to invest in learning, most recently completing an Executive Master at CFMT in Milan focused on leadership, strategy, and innovation.
Today, my role is about shaping a technology strategy that accelerates business execution and maximises customer value — drawing on a career built across hands-on problem solving, entrepreneurship, and large-scale digital transformation.
Technology’s Role in the Business
As CTO of a major online travel agency, how does the technology organisation contribute to lastminute.com’s mission of delivering seamless, personalised travel experiences for customers worldwide?
lastminute.com has always been a digital-first business, born online for the internet age, which means technology has never been a nice-to-have — it has always been a fundamental enabler. As CTO, my role is not just to set technical direction, but to work collaboratively across the business to help drive overall success. Today, technology sits at the centre of our leadership model, underpinning both customer experience and operational excellence.
We’ve fully embraced cross-functional working. Our technology teams sit alongside their product and business counterparts, collaborating daily rather than operating in a traditional project-by-project model. This allows us to move faster, stay aligned, and ensure that what we build genuinely supports customer and business needs.
What excites me most about this role is helping the organisation navigate a transformative moment for the travel industry. A key part of my responsibility is providing context and direction so teams can stay ahead of change, experiment with new technologies, and translate innovation into real business impact.
Travel is inherently complex, but technology allows us to make it feel simple. When a customer books a weekend in Barcelona through our Dynamic Holiday Packages, we’re computing millions of combinations of flights and hotels in seconds to deliver the right option at the right price. A few clicks later, the trip is booked.
I often think of the booking journey like a swan — calm and effortless on the surface, while beneath the water technology is working tirelessly to make it all happen. The real challenge isn’t just speed; it’s relevance. Our goal is to make the choices meaningful, curate the right travel experience for each customer, and remove unnecessary noise from the decision-making process.
Digital Transformation & Innovation
You have a strong background in driving digital transformation. What major technology initiatives have you led at lastminute.com to modernise the platform and enhance user experience across web and mobile?
My primary focus has been transforming technology into a true enabler, one that makes travel more accessible, intuitive, and inspiring for millions of users. Over more than 20 years, lastminute.com has grown through mergers and acquisitions, resulting in a highly complex technology landscape. Rather than seeing this as a constraint, we treated it as an opportunity.
One of our most significant initiatives has been the unification of our brands and platforms. This went far beyond a visual rebrand that brought all our former “blue” brands into a single pink identity. It involved consolidating multiple legacy systems into one coherent, modern experience, reducing friction across the entire booking journey.
Alongside this, we rebuilt several core platforms from the ground up, including ancillaries management, payment infrastructure, and a new Travel Platform layer. This platform acts as a flexible integration backbone, allowing faster innovation for both internal teams and external partners, while ensuring consistency and scalability across web and mobile experiences.
We are also heavily invested in AI-driven innovation. We’ve exposed MCP servers (Model Context Protocol) and are exploring agentic AI — not as a replacement for human decision-making, but as an intelligent assistant that supports travellers throughout their journey, from inspiration through to booking. This is about contextual understanding, richer content, and better decision support, rather than simple chatbot interactions.
Operating a high-traffic e-commerce platform gives us a powerful advantage: we can test, learn, and iterate quickly. This allows us to continuously refine how customers discover, compare, and book travel, based on real behaviour and real outcomes.
What excites me most is how we’re shaping the future of travel technology — one where AI enhances the human touch, platforms are open and collaborative, and every technical decision brings us closer to making travel simpler, more inspiring, and more accessible for everyone.
Leadership Philosophy
You’ve often said that technology is meaningless without a strong team behind it. How does this belief shape your leadership approach and the way you develop high-performing technology organisations?
Anyone who has made the transition into the C-suite knows that one of the hardest shifts is moving from solving problems personally to creating the space for others to solve them. Moving from “doing” to “enabling” requires a real change in mindset. For me, leadership is about setting the right tone, creating the right environment, and ensuring teams have the clarity and confidence to do their best work.
A core part of that approach is surrounding myself with exceptional people who share a common vision of the journey we are on. Tools and technology matter, but without the right people, transformation simply does not happen. High-performing teams are built on trust, alignment, and a shared sense of purpose.
Equally important is being clear on what success actually looks like. Measuring impact, identifying inefficiencies, and making continuous improvements — even small ones — is how teams and businesses grow sustainably. At lastminute.com, technology is not a support function; it is a core engine for faster execution and stronger customer impact. That’s why our work is tightly aligned with company Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), ensuring decisions are always grounded in meaningful outcomes.
By combining agile ways of working with robust, data-driven decision-making, we enable teams to execute efficiently while continuously improving. We also invest deliberately in our technology foundations, equipping teams with the right tools, processes, and autonomy. That combination creates an environment where innovation, collaboration, and high performance are not exceptions, but part of how we work every day.
We source elite developers worldwide and relocate them to Bilbao for seamless, real-time collaboration.
Expert engineers, European cultural alignment, and real-time collaboration.
Borderless Sourcing: We scout the best technical minds globally, bypassing local talent shortages to find the exact expertise your stack requires.
Anchored in Europe: We physically relocate engineers to Bilbao (Spain). You get global talent operating in your time zone (CET) under EU standards.
Full Lifecycle Management: From visas and relocation to payroll and retention. We handle the complexity; you get a committed, integrated team member.
In our partnership with lastminute.com, we solved a critical bottleneck facing high-growth European companies: the local talent shortage. Lastminute.com needed to scale their engineering teams rapidly, but restricting the search to the local market was slowing them down.
Konexio implements a unique model to solve this: Global Sourcing, Local Delivery. We identify elite senior engineers outside Europe and relocate them to our hub in Bilbao. This allows lastminute.com to access a massive, untapped global talent pool without the operational risks of managing remote teams across different continents.
Crucially, this model guarantees immediate operational synchronization. From the very first minute of the collaboration, these engineers operate in the Central European Time (CET) zone. There is no "transition phase" or time-zone lag. They integrate into lastminute.com’s agile rituals and communication channels instantly, functioning exactly like internal employees sitting in the next room.
Konexio acts as the strategic bridge. We manage the entire migration process—legal immigration, housing, and cultural onboarding—before the project impact begins. By absorbing this complexity, we provide stability and higher retention rates than typical remote arrangements.
For lastminute.com, the outcome is a procurement function that is faster, more secure, and richer in talent—freeing their tech leaders to focus on product innovation rather than hiring logistics.
The result is a scalable engineering extension that combines the quality of global talent with the proximity and speed of a local team.
Ready to widen your talent pool?
Speak to us about bridging the gap between global talent and local delivery.
Scalability, Reliability & Performance
Travel platforms face unpredictable demand and international traffic. How do you ensure high availability, scalability, and performance across lastminute.com’s infrastructure and services?
In travel, scale and volatility are part of the job. That said, we’ve been operating at this level for a long time and take a strongly data-driven approach, which gives us deep insight into seasonal patterns and peak moments. This allows us to prepare proactively for traffic spikes, while automated scaling ensures we can also respond effectively to unexpected external events. As a truly international business, traffic flows into our platforms almost continuously, 24/7.
Our approach is built on a simple principle: innovation and reliability are not opposites, they just need different rules.
We design our platforms to scale horizontally and elastically, using modern cloud-based infrastructure that can absorb sudden surges in demand without compromising performance. To put that into perspective, across our brands we process several billion search requests every year, evaluating an enormous number of Dynamic Package combinations in real time. Achieving that requires both computational efficiency and architectural resilience at scale.
We also move fast, deploying to production more than a thousand times per month, but always with discipline. Experimentation happens in controlled environments through feature flags, staging layers, or limited user cohorts. Core booking flows, payments, and other customer-critical services are protected by strict reliability standards, while innovation is pushed to the edges. This separation allows us to scale new ideas without putting availability or performance at risk.
Operationally, we invest heavily in observability, automation, and resilience engineering. Our systems are monitored in real time, supported by automated alerts, rollback mechanisms, and redundancy across critical services. This enables us to react quickly to anomalies and maintain high availability even under extreme load.
Ultimately, scalability for us is not just about infrastructure, it’s a mindset. By combining freedom with structure, and speed with control, we ensure lastminute.com remains reliable under pressure, performant at global scale, and able to innovate continuously in a fast-moving travel market.
Data & Personalisation
How is lastminute.com leveraging data and analytics to improve decision-making, optimise operations, and deliver more personalised and intuitive travel experiences for customers?
In travel, personalisation is no longer a differentiator, it’s an expectation. Customers want offers, content, and support that reflect their habits, timing, and intent. For us, the real value of data lies in relevance: delivering the right experience, not just quickly, but meaningfully. At lastminute.com, we now have a Chief Data & Analytics Officer, Fabio Zecchini, sitting alongside me in the C-suite for the first time in our organisation’s history. Working closely with Fabio and his team, we’re moving away from static, one-size-fits-all offers towards dynamic, intelligent customer journeys. AI is a key enabler in this shift, allowing recommendations, pricing, and support to adapt in real time based on behaviour and context, rather than relying solely on historical patterns.
One of the most important evolutions we see is the rise of AI agents. These are not simple chatbots, but intelligent assistants capable of helping customers plan, book, rebook, and manage an entire trip across channels, sometimes proactively. The future travel experience will feel less like browsing a website and more like having a personal travel assistant that anticipates needs and handles complexity seamlessly. Behind the scenes, data is also transforming how we run the business. We increasingly treat data as a product, a strategic asset that enables proactive decision-making rather than retrospective reporting. We’re investing heavily in self-service analytics through tools like Qlik, empowering teams across the organisation with accessible, reliable data and reducing dependency on centralised technical teams. Choice overload is a real challenge in travel. Thousands of hotels, hundreds of flights, endless combinations. Without intelligent curation, we’re not helping customers, we’re overwhelming them. Hyper-personalisation isn’t about showing more options, it’s about showing the right ones.
Today, much of the industry still relies on segmentation and historical comparisons. That’s useful, but true personalisation means understanding intent in real time, factoring in timing, browsing behaviour, device context, and live signals. The experience should adapt through smarter curation, not more noise. Ultimately, everything comes back to the customer. By embedding a data-first mindset across the company, investing in scalable cloud infrastructure, and strengthening our AI capabilities, we’re building more intuitive, personalised, and effortless travel experiences, while making lastminute.com a more agile, data-driven organisation. Done well, it won’t feel like an algorithm, it will feel like someone who truly gets you.
Cybersecurity & Compliance
With customer trust at the core of online travel services, what measures has the technology organisation implemented to strengthen information security, protect customer data, and ensure regulatory compliance across markets?
In travel, trust is not optional, it is the foundation. When customers book with us, they share personal data, payment details, and their plans. That trust is sacred, and we treat it as such.
Security is not just about ticking compliance boxes. Yes, we are prepared for NIS2, the new European directive on cybersecurity, and we take GDPR and data protection seriously across all markets. But regulatory frameworks are only the starting point. Real security is about mindset, architecture, and resilience.
Our approach is built around three pillars: prevention, detection, and response. Prevention means embedding security by design into everything we build, from zero-trust principles and secure architectures to continuous monitoring. Detection focuses on identifying threats quickly, using AIdriven tools and real-time analytics. Response is about readiness, with robust business continuity and incident management plans, because in travel, downtime is not just an IT issue, it directly impacts customers who may need immediate support.
We also recognise that security is not something we do in isolation. Strategic partnerships are critical. Cloudflare plays a key role in protecting our infrastructure and ensuring our platform remains fast, resilient, and secure against attacks. This is not just a vendor relationship; it is an extension of our broader security strategy.
However, technology alone is never enough. Security is a team sport. We invest heavily in training, awareness, and building a culture where every engineer and product leader understands their responsibility in protecting customer data. Accountability is shared across the organisation.
Ultimately, the goal is simple: customers should never have to worry about their data when they book with us. That is the promise we make, and the standard we hold ourselves to every day.
Partnerships & Collaborations
As CTO, you work with a wide ecosystem of technology and engineering partners. How do you evaluate and build these collaborations to ensure they genuinely accelerate innovation and delivery?
Partnerships are not about outsourcing decisions; they are about amplifying what we can build and how fast we can move. The right partner becomes part of your DNA, while the wrong one introduces friction.
I evaluate partnerships through a simple lens: strategic fit, innovation potential, and shared accountability. Can they help us move faster? Do they share our vision for where travel technology is heading? Are they dependable when things break? And, just as importantly, do they challenge us to think bigger rather than simply execute instructions?
AWS is a good example of what a true partnership looks like. It is not just infrastructure; it is a platform that allows us to scale elastically, experiment with AI, and innovate without rebuilding everything from scratch each time. We run containerised workloads on EKS, leverage autoscaling and spot instances for cost efficiency, and use AWS Bedrock to integrate AI capabilities across our platform. Beyond individual services, the value lies in how this ecosystem supports intelligent automation, operational resilience, and the future of personalised travel experiences. We are not simply renting servers; we are building on a foundation that enables continuous evolution.
Partnerships also extend well beyond infrastructure. Konexio is a strong example of a flexible, multilayered collaboration. We work with them in two complementary ways. First, their engineers embed directly into our internal teams, fully aligned with our culture, rituals, and ways of working rather than operating as external contractors. Second, they support strategic initiatives alongside our partnerships team, bringing the expertise and capacity needed to deliver complex projects end to end. This dual approach gives us both scalability and strategic depth when it matters most.
We also work closely with partners like Appian to power workflow automation, helping us eliminate manual processes across the organisation, and Gruppo Euris, who supported the design of our ITSM ecosystem. Their contribution helped us establish disciplined, reliable processes for incident and change management that match the scale and expectations of our business.
Across all these collaborations, the principles remain consistent. We look for partners who share our innovation roadmap, demonstrate resilience and reliability under pressure, deliver genuine commercial value rather than just features, and operate with the same pragmatism, speed, and outcome-focused mindset that we expect internally. We avoid vendor lock-in where it makes sense, but we are not afraid of deep, long-term partnerships when they unlock real value. It is about building strong foundations while retaining the flexibility to adapt as the market evolves.
Ultimately, great partnerships are not transactional. They are collaborative. The best ones challenge our assumptions, push us to improve, and help us build things we could not build alone. That is when technology partnerships become a true competitive advantage.
Team Development & Culture
With more than 20 years in international tech leadership, how do you cultivate a culture of collaboration, innovation, and continuous improvement across your engineering and product teams?
I’ve learned that culture is shaped far less by statements or values written on a wall and far more by the behaviours that are consistently reinforced every day. At lastminute.com, we focus on creating an environment where collaboration and innovation are embedded into how work gets done, not treated as standalone initiatives. That means giving teams clear ownership, encouraging open dialogue between engineering, product, and the wider business, and creating the psychological safety for people to challenge assumptions and put forward new ideas.
Together with my technology leadership team, we’ve worked hard to embed continuous improvement through both structure and mindset. Feedback loops are central to this, whether through retrospectives, data-driven decision-making, or cross-team reviews, allowing us to learn quickly from what works and what doesn’t. This balance of autonomy, shared learning, and accountability enables teams to move fast while steadily raising the bar on quality, scalability, and customer impact.
We also invest heavily in developing our people. One initiative that’s quite distinctive is our Fri-yays. Friday mornings are reserved for deep work or learning and development, with meetings banned wherever possible. This gives teams the space and permission to focus on improving their skills or progressing work that really matters to them. Friday afternoons are free to enjoy and ease into the weekend earlier, which feels very aligned with being a travel company at heart.
Looking ahead, we’re about to launch an in-house AI Academy. In a technology organisation where learning is already deeply ingrained, placing learning and development at the centre of the employee experience is incredibly powerful, especially as AI continues to reshape how we work.
Despite the pace of technological change and the productivity gains AI can bring by removing repetitive tasks, I firmly believe the most important aspects of leadership remain human. Motivation, trust, feedback, and growth can’t be automated. The real value emerges when people and AI work together. My advice to other leaders is simple: focus on building the right team and creating clarity. Your job isn’t to solve every problem yourself, but to create the conditions where great people can solve them better than you ever could.
Future Outlook
Looking ahead, what are your top technology priorities for lastminute.com, and how do you envision the role of travel technology evolving over the next three to five years?
My priorities are firmly rooted in solving real problems for travellers, not chasing trends. First and foremost, we are mobile-first. Most customers now start and often complete their journey on mobile, so experiences must be fast, intuitive, and truly native to mobile behaviour. Alongside this, hyperpersonalisation and curation are becoming essential. Travel is emotional, and customers expect experiences that reflect their intent, timing, and preferences, not generic recommendations. The goal is to cut through choice overload and make every interaction feel relevant and considered.
“Together with my technology leadership team, we’ve worked hard to embed continuous improvement through both structure and mindset.“
Over the next few years, we’re evolving from being a booking platform into a true travel companion, supporting customers before, during, and after their trips with real-time assistance, intelligent recommendations, and seamless management when plans change. Loyalty and customer centricity sit at the heart of this, not as points schemes, but as trust built through reliability, anticipation, and support when it matters most. All of this must be delivered at speed and scale, with resilient infrastructure that handles real-time pricing, volatile demand, and global traffic without compromise.
AI will be a major enabler, but in practical ways. For customers, it will drive meaningful personalisation and proactive support. Internally, it will boost productivity by removing repetitive work and accelerating innovation. Most disruptively, it will change how people discover and book travel, shifting from search-heavy experiences to conversational, intuitive interactions. In three to five years, I see travel technology fading into the background, making travel effortless, personal, and adaptive. When done right, customers won’t notice the technology at all, they’ll just enjoy better journeys, richer experiences, and memories that last.
lastminute.com is a European travel-tech leader in dynamic holiday packages, operating a 100 % digital business model to simplify, personalise and enhance the travel experience through technology. The company offers millions of real-time travel combinations and services that meet the diverse needs of holidaymakers, helping customers book flights, hotels, packages and experiences across destinations worldwide.
Mirco Patroncini Chief Technology Officer