Lola Founding Story⁠↗

We learned during our first year that to our surprise, 80% of our users were business travelers. This led to our first pivot, where we started to focus on business travelers exclusively.

We interviewed dozens of business travelers to learn what was different about business vs. leisure, noting that a few of us built Kayak so we already knew consumer travel. We learned many things in these interviews, for example, business users choose flights based on (a) their favorite airlines (b) the schedule, and lastly (c) the price. This led to a design which looked a bit different than consumer sites and apps.

We learned that power business travelers already have formed “shorthands” with their executive assistants which made booking travel as simple as sending a text message or email, and then trusting that the assistant already knew all your preferences and your calendar, and that s/he would just book the right thing for you. Based on this learning, we built a “book on behalf” feature that let any Lola user book travel for any of their colleagues, without having to enter all of that person’s info each time.