Lola
Lola is a new kind of travel service
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lola - Instant access to a personal travel service.

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I'm curious how you came up with the name?
Maker
Lola is a portmanteau of Longitude and Latitude.
Ohhh that makes sense. To be honest I was confused because the lowercase L in the title made me think it was an uppercase I, so I thought it was Iola.
Maker
There's a whole brand discussion here, but the short version is that we like the symmetry of lola written as all lowercase in the brand mark (see the web site lolatravel.com for the word mark), and thought the app name looked nice that way on the phone.
I'm an avid Pana user—seems like Lola is similar. In what ways is Lola different?
How does this differ from Pana?
I just downloaded the app and the on-boarding experience was really cool! I'm curious what happens as my preferences change over time. Does Lola detect that or do I have to go in and change them?
Maker
Lola learns your habits, and makes future recommendations based on that.
Do you use real travel agents or bots on the other end of my conversation?
Maker
We use real people.
BostInno wrote a great piece about Lola and what their plans are: They have real travel agents assisted by AI (). I'm quite excited about their growth model, which is to allow any travel agent to go on the Lola platform in the future and help make bookings. No wonder was driving people around using Uber a while back!
What's the business model?
Maker
It's all commissions on travel products, and later this year we will roll out membership programs with fees and benefits.
I've been on the beta for a while now and have been pretty pleased with it! I love the idea of not having to deal with all of this stuff on my own, and Lola does a good job of executing on that.
I've been a user for the past month and love the service. It's fantastic to always have access to a travel agent who has all of your preferences and information. Being able to book the next leg of a trip from a cab stuck in Beijing traffic is wonderful.
Awesome to see Paul English (founder, KAYAK) and team back at it again. And, as always, an interesting take on an age-old (and big) problem.
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