Travel App Lola Raises $20 Million, Brings The Personal Back To Booking

Kayak co-founder and former CTO Paul English is launching a travel app called Lola this week, which aims to bring a personal touch back to online travel booking. The app secured $19.7 million in a series A funding round.

As of now, Lola is fairly exclusive, with an invite-only model. Though currently free to invited members, according to the app’s Web site, a paid subscription model is in the works.

The app will utilize a combination of AI and actual travel agents—the service only has 15 agents at the moment but reportedly plans to hire around a hundred. The AI will handle simple informational requests at first, so that the agents can focus on the customer service aspects of the job.

It sounds like the programming team will be developing the AI’s capabilities as they gain larger volume of requests to parse through.

According to one estimate, travel makes up about 8% of the U.S. GDP and about 40% of all ecommerce. eMarketer predicts that this year, 101.0 million American adults will research a trip on a mobile device and 59.3 million U.S. adults will actually book a trip via a mobile device.

That increase in mobile usage has also led to a dramatic decrease in desire to actually speak to people, which is why Lola is a message-based service (which explains the AI aspect of the company).

The name Lola is a shorthand portmanteau of longitude and latitude.




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