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lola — Instant access to a personal travel service.
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@agentbillo Ohhh that makes sense. To be honest I was confused because the lowercase L in the title made me think it was an uppercase I, so I thought it was Iola.
@jimmydouglas There's a whole brand discussion here, but the short version is that we like the symmetry of lola written as all lowercase in the brand mark (see the web site lolatravel.com for the word mark), and thought the app name looked nice that way on the phone.
Awesome to see Paul English (founder, KAYAK) and team back at it again. And, as always, an interesting take on an age-old (and big) problem.
Downloaded the app yesterday and now I'm in! Very excited to test lola out and book my next trip :)
A suggestion: while you're still gating beta user entry, allowing me to opt-in to push notifications before I'm let into the beta (instead of opting-in afterward, in my settings) could be useful. I just happened to check the app this morning, but might not have noticed for a few days.
@chrismessina It's all commissions on travel products, and later this year we will roll out membership programs with fees and benefits.
I've been on the beta for a while now and have been pretty pleased with it! I love the idea of not having to deal with all of this stuff on my own, and Lola does a good job of executing on that.
Travel and AI (and travel bots) seem to have a large amount of competition and variety.
Tell us about lola and what is so awesome about it :) - the demo makes it look a lot more comprehensive than others I've seen but would love to hear the story behind it
@bentossell Planning travel is incredibly variable and complicated. Understanding what a traveler really wants and needs is still the province of humans. When you use Lola to plan and book, you are working with a human travel consultant, who will understand what you need in a way that no NLP chatbot can.
We handle the this "front" part of the problem, understanding what you need, with a human, but then we provide that human with powerful predictive search tools so they can quickly make good recommendations to you.
Another important notion is that planning a trip and then traveling is very much a long conversation. When you're on a trip, sometimes things go wrong, like a flight cancellation or some kind of hotel problem. With Lola, you just tap right into that conversation and say "help, my flight was cancelled," and somebody is helping you immediately. They don't have to ask who you are, or which flight was cancelled: they instantly know the context and can start fixing the problem.
@agentbillo @bentossell so excited to use this. I like the analogy to a "long conversation" -- it makes so much sense. It's why we had travel agents for so long. Not only for the curation or recommendation but also to handle things as bumps come up in the plans.
BostInno wrote a great piece about Lola and what their plans are: http://bostinno.streetwise.co/20...
They have real travel agents assisted by AI (@zmrobins). I'm quite excited about their growth model, which is to allow any travel agent to go on the Lola platform in the future and help make bookings. No wonder @englishpaulm was driving people around using Uber a while back!
Looks great! I'll wait for the android version. Interesting trend though: we went from someone curating services and us trusting their opinion (travel agents), to finding them ourselves (search and comparison) and now we're heading back to trusted travel agents...?
I just downloaded the app and the on-boarding experience was really cool! I'm curious what happens as my preferences change over time. Does Lola detect that or do I have to go in and change them?
@pseudovirtual Lola learns your habits, and makes future recommendations based on that.
Nice on boarding! Quick and painless, and that is the 🔑!! What kind of time frame is planned to roll out the beta users? I signed up earlier but have no way to track my wait time/ position in line to get access. Thoughts on this?
One feature that's a must in Europe at least is price. 87% of Europeans can't afford a one week vacation
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