Interview: Lola’s CEO Wants to Hack Mobile Trip Planning With Travel Agents
Photo Credit: Paul English, co-founder and CEO of Lola, wants to turn trip-planning on its head by 'threading' travel agents throughout a consumer travel app. Lola Travel
Skift Take
It's a bold idea and the software might turn out to be beautiful (bold and beautiful) but do leisure and business travelers at scale REALLY want to abandon self-booking tools in favor of human travel agent interaction on a mobile app? We are going to find out.
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 tha
