Lola

@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 ahh I see! so its the combo that makes lola 🔥

@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.

@jimmydouglas Lola is a portmanteau of Longitude and Latitude.

@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.