Skift Take
English envisions a travel booking experience where users can simply talk to their phone and have the perfect trip planned for them. Questions remain, however, about how exactly Lola's technology will enable customer service professionals to become indistinguishable from experienced travel agents.
The inspiration behind Kayak co-founder Paul English's newest project lies in the relationship between road warriors and the executive assistants who book travel for them.
Lola, which launched on the Apple App Store as an invite-only travel booking service, combines artificial intelligence with personalized service in a mobile environment.
While mobile-only booking tools have been attempted before, English's experience as Kayak's chief technology officer brings a technology-first approach to solving the pain points of booking complex trips on mobile.
English spoke with Skift about the emergence of mobile messaging in the travel space, how artificial intelligence can help superpower travel agents, and his obsession with Amazon Alexa's voice recognition prowess.
Skift: How have the changing behaviors of how people use their smartphones led to your strategy behind Lola?
English: One, people don't like making phone calls on their phone. They're using it for messaging more minutes a day than they are using it for apps on their phone even. Messaging is bigger than apps. The fact that travel is half online and half offline, the question is if people don't look at us to make phone calls, where's all that traffic going to go? Some is going to go online, I think I lot is going to become messaging.
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