HBX’s Xabier Zabala discusses applying technology in today’s travel and tourism sectors

At HBX Group’s recently concluded MarketHub 2025 industry conference in Macau, Group chief operating officer Xabier Zabala spoke to peers regarding the practical application of generative artificial intelligence (AI) and similar nascent technologies to the travel and tourism industries.

Travel Daily Media‘s own Gary Marshall had the opportunity to sit down with Zabala during the conference to get a more in-depth look at how the COO sees technology impacting key sectors.

Travel Daily Media (TDM) As you mentioned, it’s the topic with this particular conference, and that is the topic of AI. Just want to pass over you now and just talk about how AI is affecting and assisting and helping grow the travel industry.

Xabier Zabala (XZ)     AI is already transforming and will radically transform the travel industry. 

I’m specifically looking at how it will transform travel operations; it’s an amazing topic, and we are already seeing many significant applications of AI in our business. 

At HBX, we’ve already begun to automate customer service management through AI; this means we can speed up the resolution of the queries and the demand that we have from our customers to give them better service. 

Also, by automating part of that work, we can ensure that our teams can focus on the higher value added on more challenging cases and in those areas that call for our experts as these require more skill. 

It’s a win-win situation: between answering the basic queries and then having more time, more quality time spent on the harder topics so that we can provide a better resolution to our customers, that improves the customer experience, and it also improves the employee experience because we are also able to give them better tools to do their job. 

In the end, our mantra or our main goal is to give superpowers to our teams as our people are at the very core of what we do at HBX, together with the technology and the data. 

We are looking at how we can multiply the contribution they make to the business, and, for that, how we can give them those superpowers so that they can help our customers in a better manner.

TDM      When you’re talking about the customer side, you’re talking about the consumer side, or are you talking about from the B2B point of view? By this, we mean your hotel partners, your travel agent partners, services, and others.

XZ      From our side, it’s mostly how we can best help ourB2B partners as our shared end-goal is to help the end travelers. 

To help our B2B partners, we seek to give them better tools with which to manage end travelers; and the sooner we can answer their queries, the sooner we can resolve their issues, the faster they will be able to provide that resolution to the end traveler. 

So, what we want to do is to enable that better service that they can also provide the travelers.

TDM    Okay, I guess from a transactional point of view, it’s speeding up the process. You talked before about helping with the profitability of your partners’ businesses. Talk to me a little bit more about that side.

XZ    In the end, it accelerates the entire process as it brings efficiency and productivity into the entire process, so we can do everything faster. 

That means that we need to put less resources into more repetitive activities in order to become more profitable.

By doing so, we can be more productive, and therefore we can decide whether we want to transmit that efficiency into the value chain, into our partners and the end travelers. 

It makes everything more efficient, and that gives all of us options to then either provide higher quality or pass part of that value to our customers and the end travelers.

How to use technology more effectively

TDM     I think one thing I’ve noticed when I talk to hoteliers is they are hearing a lot about AI. Are you finding that some of the struggles with this topic involve trying to educate the customers on how to use it most effectively?

XZ Yes, it’s not an easy topic: it’s a very shiny, fancy topic.

Then again, it’s not so easy to design the right way to bring the right applications into production and, eventually, marketable products. 

Actually, there’s a study that shows that most business leaders are actually frustrated or disappointed with the progress that they see with AI: they’re not entirely sure about how to apply it to their daily operations. 

I had the opportunity to share some of the examples of how we are doing that in HBX: it’s all about selecting very specific use cases where you can see tangible value from automating certain repetitive activities, giving a better insight to our team so that they can do a better job in their day-to-day work. 

Some of the examples I gave were about customer service automation, which I have just mentioned, but also about how we train our technologies. 

We now have new solutions where we can put our people into very realistic scenarios, and they can go through hundreds of simulated but very realistic calls and cases that are client-like cases that are AI created. 

Every scenario is different, voices are different, levels of difficulty are different, and they can get so well trained before they go into production that before we couldn’t because it wasn’t scalable to do it one-to-one with trainers, human trainers in the process.

There’s many other examples like content generation: both text and image management have become extremely high quality, extremely high precision through AI. 

We can now review all the texts that we have in our systems coming from humans, mostly, and score them and improve them with AI. 

We can rapidly detect punctuation errors, grammatical errors, lines that aren’t very punchy or not sharp enough; and we can improve the strength of the messaging through the AI.

We can then easily translate this into every language available out there so that the travelers can see that text in their own native language; likewise, we have multiplied our capacity of content generation through these solutions.

Making things easier for travel agencies

TDM     How about in the land of making sales in the travel industry? Because I think in most brick and mortar travel agencies, for example, and I’m sure the majority of others as well, there’s a high degree of inquiry versus conversions. Is there a process using AI to help with the follow-up process to convert sales?

XZ      Absolutely; I think what we are seeing already is a drastic change in the discovery process, so the inspiration and discovery. 

These AI solutions are going to give travel agencies a way to personalize much more the proposals that they can bring to their travelers. 

Until now, they had their own expertise, which will be valid for most of the destinations that they are more familiar with. 

But, maybe in those destinations that they are less familiar with, they can now very easily ask any of the AI models. 

For example: I have a family of four, and what they like is the outdoors, adventures, and this is their budget: what are the main options that you can offer in terms of hotel options and activities? 

There will be these tools coming into every solution related to the outdoors.

We are already implementing the technology in some of our search options; we saw that today.

We also have a new business unit that is about luxury travel; within that unit, we have already inserted within the search engine a way to do a generative AI search. 

The system will deliver the right responses to your specific needs when you say what trip you are looking for.

This is going to accelerate and facilitate the work of the travel agencies more and more so that they can do more curated, higher-end activities. 

It’s going to speed up and significantly facilitate the work of the travel agents.

About Xabier Zabala

Xabier Zabala joined the BBX Group in 2016 and has occupied leadership positions in the commercial and operations areas.

In September 2024, he joined the executive committee upon his appointment as chief operating officer.

In his current capacity, he handles the company’s global operations across brands and products, ensuring a seamless delivery of high-quality services to HBX Group partners worldwide.