Many companies, both traditional and so-called disruptors, launch products aimed at the business travel market. Few seem as timely as the launch of Lola Works, a dashboard for travel managers whose travellers use the Lola app to book their own business travel.
Lola's usefulness has grown with the addition of Lola Works. This group management tool enables corporate managers to introduce some limited corporate rules such as price guidelines in different destinations, flight classes or hotel grades into the Lola app. There is also a dynamic pricing facility so that suitable properties in a price bracket to reflect the quality of hotel that the corporate wants its travellers to use can be offered.
The development acknowledges the seemingly unstoppable rise of traveller centricity with a passing nod to the 2018 market environment of rapidly changing business conditions coupled with a corporate need for controls for both budget and duty-of-care reasons.
Lola Works provides the manager with some travel data and the travellers the equivalent of a light travel policy in the form of guidelines. The travel policy is not mandated but it does make suggestions and guides the traveller towards decisions that are corporately responsible.
Lola was launched last year to great fanfare as the latest venture by Kayak co-founder and former CTO Paul English. It is available only as an app (there is no desktop version) so it suits travellers who want to book their own travel via a mobile device, another strong trend of our times.
As well as a booking tool, it's also a concierge service which offers travellers itinerary management and 24/7 support by humans. This was originally chat-based; it now is using machine learning and bot-based.
The app is a mix of AI and old-fashioned human service. It makes use of personalisation — the algorithm which controls the profile is fed both traveller-provided preferences (aisle or window? only hotels with gym facilities?) and automatically collected historical behaviour data. The automated tastes data is also used to create traveller clusters.
So we have a traveller tool which is combining supplier app functionality with a support service to potentially reduce the number of apps any business traveller needs.
Lola has a lot of contradictions — it's a digital business but it makes money from charging users for its services not from business promotions. It claims to be traveller-focused but relies on automation to attract business travellers who book their own business travel. It's also making tentative steps towards accommodating managed travel.
Many disruptors move from being start-ups to companies with structures and rules.
With its mix of humans and automation, digital enhancements from AI to bots and the flexibility to address both traveller and corporate needs, Lola Works' structure reflects our times.