When one prominent person or company launches a new product or service, they might be testing the water. When another follows, it looks like a trend.
Last week Paul English, co-founder of Kayak, made a lot of noise about changing course with his next travel entrepreneurial project — Lola. English has discovered that two-thirds of Lola users were business travellers so he was relaunching it — or pivoting it in the start-up jargon - to focus of the needs of that particular market.
Lola, for the uninitiated, is a bot, an air and hotel booking app which combines artificial intelligence with human travel agents to make trip planning personally tailored to each user. It's like FCM's SAM, a virtual concierge for frequent travellers that makes use of AI but leaves the option for human intervention when it is needed.
Now that English has more information on the profile of Lola's users, it is set to be even more like SAM which claims to support "all aspects of travel - itineraries, gate changes, driving directions, weather, restaurant recommendations and reservations" as well as having a "call or SMS my consultant" option to get users to a live FCM consultant 24 hours a day for live assistance on the go.
Lola's research has identified three main challenges that business users face: booking their favourite airline or hotel chain so they can rack up reward points, rescheduling plans when a flight is cancelled or delayed, and avoiding the "analysis paralysis" that comes with being flooded with hundreds of travel options.
Lola's algorithms depend on machine learning to help the app identify each user's travel preferences – for boutique hotels with wine bars, for example – and anything the AI can't handle goes to one of Lola's 15 travel agents on staff.
Lola hopes eventually to create a corporate product by rolling out features aimed at managers that will allow them to coordinate travel across entire teams.
On the face of it the two bots are doing the same thing — making use of personal knowledge of the traveller and his or her travel patterns and bookings to offer support as and when needed.
Finer points of the tools and capability may vary but they are essentially the same. The big difference comes back to whether you want a one-stop shop where all the tools and services are essentially via the TMC or whether you want to choose the suppliers and directly manage the relationships — it's not unlike the online booking tool — should the travel manager have the direct relationship or is it best to rely on the TMC's suite of products and have to deal only with the TMC?
There are pros and cons for both and it's not all about cost...