AI EVOLUTION AND ITS DISRUPTION IN TOURISM: Will there be a new structural change in Spain? … By José Aleixandre Caballero
June 2026.
I remember when in December 1985 they “sold us” internet technology as a great advance, the exclusive predecessor of the Webs, which began to exist in 1991 and which were the reason for the start of the structural dismantling of the promotion systems, and introduction of Spain’s hotel industry, in the countries of origin and their markets, whose marketing and sales systems were based on their own sales teams, strengthened through Travel Agencies and Tour Operators with their own identity known worldwide.
I was part of a large group of tourism professionals for many years, and we were the ones who called into question the “benefits” of the internet…, and we behaved intuitively cautious after the arrival of websites for a simple reason…, the feeling of mistrust that an “invisible” technology generated in us, distant, outside our control, reach and domain of content…. perhaps for such obvious reasons or due to ignorance and lack of knowledge, we were very reluctant… before we found ourselves almost on the verge of succumbing.
What we did realize and saw clearly and with certainty was the fact that we were going to lose direct contact with all markets and customers… as “they” would be the ones marketing the products as a result of Spain’s circumstantial moment, which favored its implementation…. Due to the opportunism of the moment “propitiated” without giving us time to evaluate or… yes… (I think there could have been premeditation).
The consequences, as uncontrolled as they were unpredictable, soon generated serious conflicts of interest, with intermediary Travel Agencies, tour operators and tourism businessmen, all subsidiarily responsible for the products and their loyalty, until we lost them….
We closed a stage of commercial, business, human and close contacts, which gave us the reliability and credibility offered by a very productive system, relationships that had cost us so much work, effort, time and money to build in order to position Spain as one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world…. work and added values that the new “invading” intermediaries found ready-made.
Evidently that new “technology” was introduced as a “hacker” in the form of websites into our tourism Industry, in the face of which you can or want to do little or nothing to prevent its disruption in our global market, after destroying all the existing usual marketing and commercialization structures and systems and establishing itself definitively….
displacing, thwarting and breaking with the tourism businesses and economies that had been established to take advantage of a business like the global tourism market introduced, implemented and in full operation and… with loyal demand… taking over with its technology and system the domination of markets in almost 80% of Spain’s global tourism capacity.
Now we realize that the damage caused has been much greater even than the economic benefits it has brought…, a simple example of “economy” is that legal “visible” intermediary Travel Agencies were granted between 8% and 10% commission on sales made and now intermediary Websites charge a minimum of 15% and depending on positioning up to 30%… with the aggravating factor, that those commissions are paid almost entirely outside our country and do not pay taxes in Spain…
…you don’t have to calculate too much to realize what that means in millions of Euros.
Let’s remember a bit and recall that before the internet AI already existed… a technology that seemed to be heading towards robotics that advanced with slow development, directed towards a much more scientific than commercial world… Let’s note that in 1950 AI diverted its evolution from robotics towards a means or technology system, heading towards “intelligent” communication and consultation,… basically towards industrial and scientific development, giving rise to a new facet of technological consultation of great dimensions and unlimited potential… under suspicion of lack of credibility in its unreliable contents… once again uncontrolled and uncontrollable technologies, insecure and with “unknown” intentions and origin…
They are presenting AI to us as an “essential” tool for our daily life, knowing full well its incomplete and unreliable content bases!!!
Its arrival in our lives begins as a determining necessity for, a geometric evolution and development that from the year 2024 in which its popularity “explodes”, begins to “compete”, or… no… with other technologies in collusion with those already existing and also “through” the internet, of course.
I have never allowed myself to give an opinion about “impossible entities with which I cannot connect because they are unreliable due to being intangible and with technologies whose aims I do not know”,…. but I do question myself as an “ignorant user” forced to use them in my daily life…. I ask myself who is the “father” (or the mother…) of the trilogy that impunely “dominates and subjugates us”, directing us to the use of a technological world outside our control and reach, even of their intentions and interests that we ignore… I mean
Internet and therefore “the websites and AI” who should be subsidiarily responsible for the serious economic consequences caused by lack of data protection, scams, fakes, deceptions, unfair competition, insecurity in transactions, impossibility of rectification or cancellation of our data. Where is the guarantor who, as creator of the system, guarantees its effects? and the errors it transmits to us, ?? What is the guarantee of the veracity of its information and data protection if they are “stolen”… Who is responsible for the “addiction” in the use of its technologies and for the “submission to which they subject us”… Consequently I deduce that these entities should be responsible for the damages they cause and be forced to attend to the complaints and claims that their technologies produce…. and there is no answer of course… it is not necessary, we all know that we are defenseless before such corporations… does anyone know, except experts, their address or even the name of the company, of its responsible executives, or contact of such monsters? What do we know about the country of origin and its laws? Because we are ceding and we cede intimate personal data with all kinds of details that they can use with impunity…. without any effective responsibility.
Who does not receive calls, Gmail emails, whatsapp messages or is tempted with deceptive ads on websites…
It is curious that when AI became “fashionable” almost no one questions it and much less refuses… the use of these powerful tools, which I consider to this day as compatible in our “virtualized” world… let’s take as at least a curious fact that already in 1989 AI created the famous supercomputer Deep Blue and that the origin of the network is set in 1950.
Here is my humble thinking, a consequence of the intuition produced by my experiences, accepting ignorance about the reality of the “purpose” of the technologies mentioned, after an inevitable reflection I conclude… that all three technologies are the product of the collection of data produced by human brains, including errors, good deeds and evils, and today they are the ones that dominate the “wills”, insecure or not, of human beings” in the globalized world… In whose hands are we???
I therefore begin to transpose options (not without enormous doubts) about the ¿¿imminent??; or at least possible disruption of AI in the Tourism world and its effects on marketing and sales structures…. which in its day revolutionized the internet with its websites causing the already suffered, serious and irreconcilable damages to the Spanish economy and to the entire tourism industry… Are we facing a new era of Tourism?
Let us base our hope on the “possibility” that technologies complement us but do not replace us..
José Aleixandre Caballero :Technical Director Consultant of Tourism Businesses and Companies
