Lola Pivot to Business Travel Is All About the App
Skift Take
Lola's push into business travel makes sense given the needs and booking frequency of experienced road warriors. But as Upside has experienced, attracting the right kind of users is a big challenge when travelers can just book trips themselves.
When Lola launched last year, founder Paul English thought a combination of deep-learning artificial intelligence and travel agents would represent a transformative tool for both leisure and business travelers.
English, best known for co-founding metasearch site Kayak, says Lola's current pivot to attract business travelers is based on a series of realizations soon after the company launched its app for consumers.
"Two-thirds of our users were business travelers," said English. "I didn't think after Kayak that I would start a travel company, I thought I would start something in chat....
"I thought I was building a consumer company like Kayak and discovered it was business travelers that wanted chat. The second thing is that I thought we were building for chat, email, and phone. We found that people almost never want to talk on the phone. The older road warriors are almost more expert than younger ones, and they're really interested in efficiency. They like sending a command and going off to do something while we do somethin
