Interview: Lola's CEO Wants to Hack Mobile Trip Planning With Travel Agents

Paul English, the Kayak co-founder who now leads the newly christened travel startup Lola, thinks he can reinvent the trip-planning and booking experience in the digital era by weaving travel agents at every turn into a mobile app for consumers. "Your life as a traveler will change if you have a mobile app that's completely threaded with humans at every step of the way," English told Skift in an interview at Lola's Boston offices on December 2. The former chief technology officer at digital-only Kayak, English and his venture-backed startup are taking the heretical step of hiring at least 100 in-the-flesh travel agents, many of whom will work on the building's third floor alongside engineering geeks who are coding a new travel agent console as well as a consumer mobile app. Plans call for Lola to employ 250 people by the end of 2016, and funding in the works would ensure that Lola can keep going for 18 months without an infusion of commercial revenue. "We want to make sure that as the engineers we are building our agent tools, and if we're writing codes that are sloppy or have bugs or are slow, we want those travel agents in the same building, digging the shit out of it," English said. Skift sat down with English, co-founder and CTO Bill O'Donnell, and other members of the team in Lola's basement office, with rock and contemporary tunes blaring in the background. Besides reinventing trip-planning, English has the wild idea that he can make travel agents, beset by commission cuts and agency closings over the years, happy again. An edited version of the interview follows: Skift: The new name of your startup is Lola. What does the name mean? English: The name's an important thing for us. First of all we just love the word, we love the sound of it. We like how the word looks, we like that it's four letters, it's easy to say. We've tested it in multiple language, multiple countries. It has positive response in multiple countries, so that's really great. It's a portmanteau. Do you know what that is? Skift: No. English: Our last company (Kayak) was a palindrome, spelled both backwards and forwards and this one's a portmanteau. This is a word I learned only recently. It's basically taking two words and smashing them together so in our case it's longitude and latitude, Lola. I could try to give you some really fancy line about longitude and latitude and find the direction of that but it's not really about that. It's more that we just