Lola Launches Managed Travel Tools

Kayak co-founder and former chief technology officer Paul English's travel booking and chat-based traveler assistant tool Lola pivoted last year from a leisure travel strategy to a focus on the unmanaged business traveler. Today, the company will launch Lola Works, a managed travel "lite" solution for the small and midmarket that offers administrative tools and dashboards that allow simple policy controls, centralize a view of a company's travel footprint and track overall travel spend.

Lola's primary platform remains traveler oriented and built around personal preferences and loyalty program affiliations as drivers behind business travel bookings. "We spent a bunch of time with [road warriors] to understand their needs and to figure out what apps they were using and what does and does not work for them," said English. "Business travelers care about price, but they are not making decisions based solely on price. They want their miles and points," he added, and the app is built to display choices based on past booking history and declared preferences stored in the user profile.

Lola Works dovetails with the traveler-facing app by integrating simple company guidelines, controls and rate caps into the loyalty and personal preference equation. The desktop administrative app allows a company to identify its top travel markets—for example, Chicago, San Francisco, London and Singapore—and further identify company preferred hotels in those markets for travelers to consider when booking their trips. The preferred hotels are prioritized in the traveler's search with a "preferred" notation, along with a list of properties based on the traveler's  historical bookings, amenities and style preferences, crunched through Lola's algorithms that also cluster and organize millions of reviews and hotel sentiment data to make relevant recommendations.

Hotel selection can be further influenced through the Lola Works platform by setting rate caps in each popular market. The app can take some of the work out of the task by allowing admins to create a rate cap for certain  amenities and class of service in Chicago, for example, then an algorithm will take over to provide appropriate rate caps for San Francisco, London and Singapore to achieve consistency in those cities. Search results also will offer current market guidance on whether the rate displayed for a given hotel is a good value on the day or whether it is currently "expensive" according to company guidelines.

The new admin interface offers similarly "lite" drop-down controls for flight search and booking, allowing companies to identify how travelers should utilize premium economy, business class and first class cabins—for example, flights longer than three hours are eligible for premium economy while flights longer than six hours are eligible for business class, but first class is never allowed. The tool encourages companies to keep the travelers in mind, with settings geared toward productivity and fitting into travelers' personal schedules. The "direct flight" settings allow admins to identify a cost threshold for travelers to take a direct flight versus a connecting flight; while the "wiggle room" setting allows cost flexibility for time of day preferences, rather than forcing travelers to choose lowest cost options.

English emphasized that Lola Works isn't built to deny business travelers options but to provide guidelines. The tool cannot be configured to block bookings.  "If you go onto the Concur website, there's a white paper called 'Leakage' because 50 percent of travelers are cheating and going outside the tools. When half of your travelers do that, you lose your ability to manage consistently," said English. "Especially for the small and midmarket business, which is our target market, it's important to show that road warriors have no reason to go outside Lola. We want them to get their reward points in Lola and have all the hotels they want. If you book outside of guidelines, we'll tell you it's outside of guidelines but you can go ahead and book it." English added that most business travelers have good reasons to go outside guidelines when they do, and soon Lola will include a system for communicating those reasons back to the administrative tool at the time of booking.

In addition to simple policy configurations, Lola Works will offer quick reporting and visual dashboards for admins to track traveler location and spend. A map view shows where travelers are located on the current day, while trip and spend details can be tracked on the current day, for the month to date or for the year to date. They are tracked by traveler and by trip. Flight and hotel costs for each trip are displayed as a bundle on the overview, and admins can drop down details on the trip to dig deeper into flight and hotel costs. Currently, compliance notifications are not part of the Lola Works tool, but English said they are in the development hopper.

Lola currently operates on $44 million in venture capital from General Catalyst, Accel Partners, Charles River Ventures, GV and Tenaya Ventures. The company has a direct-to-corporate strategy for the SME market, though English previously told BTN Lola would entertain agency partnerships. For now, Lola Works is free for companies that have travelers as Lola users, but English told BTN the company will introduce fees for the administrative tool. Regarding the traveler-facing app, Lola collects hotel commissions "and we get a tiny bit from airlines," said English. The VIP service component has been free to date for users and one of the most valuable aspects of Lola for travelers, according to the company. While Lola has sophisticated artificial intelligence to produce relevant search results for travelers, the majority of its chat interface and personal service relies on human agents supported internally by AI. English said that is by design. Lola is entering a managed SME travel space that has increasingly pursued AI solutions but with many tools defaulting to human agents.