Lola Pivots to Travel Management With New CEO
Photo Credit: Lola CEO Mike Volpe, left, with Lola co-founder and now CTO Paul English. Lola is diving deeper into travel management, a far cry from its original goal of becoming a leisure travel booking innovator. Lola
Skift Take
Lola has struggled to catch on as it now pivots to provide travel management tools to small companies. Mobile booking through travel agents never broke through and it's hard to see a path forward for Lola in the extremely crowded market for managing small group travel.
When Paul English's Lola launched, it aimed to bring the traditional travel agent into the mobile-only space with a compelling personalized chat experience for travelers. English's pre-launch vision called for 100 agents, empowered by Lola's proprietary tools that would allow them to use global distribution systems like they were cyborgs.
"We’re trying to create superhuman travel consultants who are AI-powered and can handle more trips per hour than a regular travel agent can,” English told Skift in May 2016 when the Lola app launched with the company employing only 15 agents. “They can make dramatically better recommendations than normal travel agents.”
A partnership with luxury travel agency Virtuoso followed along with the acquisition of metasearch technology from Room 77.
A year after launch, though, Lola pivoted to business travel and abandoned leisure travel altogether with fresh branding. It seemed to English that frequent business travelers would have more of
