SOMETIMES YOU WANT A HUMAN AT THE END OF THE LINE
When travel started moving online with the launch of Expedia two decades ago, the death watch for travel agents began. After all, who needs an expert to arrange hotels and flights when you can just tap into the reservation system and do it yourself? But although they’ve lost ground, agents still accounted for 28% of bookings for the $341 billion U.S. travel market last year, according to industry research group Phocuswright. Online travel agencies, such as Expedia, Travelocity, and their ilk, represented 17%.
It was numbers like these that drew Paul English, the cofounder and former chief technical officer of Kayak, back into travel four years after selling his site to Priceline for $2.1 billion. This spring he launched Lola, a new mobile-only concierge-style booking service that’s centered entirely on chat. With Phocuswright predicting that mobile will account for a quarter of online domestic travel bookings by 2017, creating an appbased service is a forward-thinking move. Even more prescient is English’s decision to power Lola with both human and artificial intelligence.
Travelers can use the subscription-based Lola, which is currently invite-only (it opens to the public in the fall), to book flights, hotels and Airbnbs, restaurants, and even tours and activities. Depending on the complexity of the request, either a professional travel consultant or a chatbot will respond with options and suggestions, logging clients’ preferences and behaviors along the way. The idea: Use machine learning to make travel consultants more efficient and intuitive, and use humans to maintain that intangible matchmaking quality of an old-school travel agent. Though initially all but the most basic questions (such as “What time is my flight?”) will be addressed by humans, English expects the balance to shift significantly to bots as Lola becomes smarter. But he has no plans to give up on travel advisers. “Travel is stressful,” he says. “We are very focused on maintaining human-to-human contact.”
English saw the opportunity for Lola when he realized that the experience of booking a hotel or flight has remained remarkably static for the past two decades. While websites have improved the process of filtering and finding rooms and seats, most are still variations on a theme: they aggregate inventory from various sources and make travelers do the rest of the work. On the other end of the spectrum are travel agents, who arrange customized trips from end to end while dealing with any hiccups during the journey. The problem: They still conduct business over email and phone. “Apps have trained us to be irritated by the phone,” says English. “People prefer the asynchronous efficiencies of an app—you can do multiple things at once.” A messaging platform seemed a natural solution. But instead of turning to chatbots to cut out agents, English saw how they might work together.
As the service grows, English plans to hire more multilingual agents and offer subscriber benefits, including airport-lounge access and early check-in/late checkout, free breakfast, and upgrades at hotels. He’ll also shop the platform to travel agencies. After nearly a decade of helping to put them out of business, English is now ready to empower them.