Happy cards, please!
Hi, everyone, I'm delighted to be here. My name is Krista
and I oversee business development at Lola and I've spent almost half of my
life in travel in technology, so I like to think I learned a thing or two. One
thing I know for sure and that is that corporate travel is really ripe for
change. So what I'm going to share with you today are some of the exciting
opportunities where Lola.com is innovating in this space, and we're aimed
at fixing some of the key problems in business travel. So let's jump into some
of those problems. All too often getting started with a
travel program is super tedious. It takes a really long time, sometimes months. The
situation gets really complicated by the fact that pricing is convoluted and the
long list of a la carte fees are often hidden. Travelers feel like they're being
gouged, especially when they need service. And add to that the travelers can't find
the good content that they want to book, and even if they do, it seems that
nothing falls within their budget. Tracking and reconciliation systems are
manual and it's a chase--policies, if they exist, are ambiguous. Getting someone to
help you when you need it never seems timely or to go smoothly. So welcome to
Lola.com where we're on a mission to making managing business travel easy. Our
product values are part of our DNA. They include beauty, consistency,
ease-of-use, speed, and rich content. We don't want travelers to go elsewhere to
get a product or a deal. We want to provide actionable insights and to spend
actual cost savings and provide world-class service. There are over 500,000
small and medium enterprise companies in the US who currently don't
have a managed travel program, and they have been using leisure travel sites, so
their bar is they expect ease of use to be at least at parity with the leisure
travel sites. So at Lola, we've taken the approach that focuses on the company,
the traveler, and service tools that enable a frictionless and consumerized
experience. We're providing companies with these dashboards for full
visibility, policy management, reporting, and helping them have visibility into
where their travelers are. Travelers want to buy with modern apps, they want apps
that they actually like to use, top-notch service, and comprehensiveness and
content. Our travel agents use a proprietary console where all
interactions and transactions are visible to them. That creates an
experience that complement and support each other to remove that friction
across all touch points. Our modern, fast, and clean user experience has been
awarded as the number-one program for small and medium businesses in the US
and it was developed using graph QL, which enables our front-end dev team and
our back-end deck dev teams to work together in parallel without being
blocked by each other. And the point of this is it allows us to work really fast,
because our mantra is speed wins. And for instance, we've built our desktop version
in under four four months. So fast forward a lot of that, we want to get to
the air stuff because I know that's important here. Our approach in
displaying air content uses algorithms that mirror the way business travelers
actually search and book. So for instance you'll see our non-stop flights are
grouped by airline, and we float preferred airlines of the traveler to the top.
These algorithms increase relevance, they increase conversions, and at the same
time, they decrease the dreaded leakage. Companies want their travelers to stay
within the program, and so do we. We've built a unique travel
agent and service console on our platform which is a hundred percent
compatible with our apps and that will arm our resident team of travel agents
to service all requests and transactions for the travelers without having to go
into the GDS for everything. Overall this decreases
service to resolution times and increases our ability to scale without
sacrificing quality. A lot of you here are friends, as we are, with ATPCO and the
Routehappy family, so I'd like to jump into a little more fun stuff to show you.
We're hyper focused on helping travelers quickly find what they need to book with
speed, accuracy, and availability. You can see here with our Routehappy
integration that we're beginning to add more flavor incorporated with all of the
results to help consumers make smarter choices. Travelers do want to know what
their choices are, so we need to make that more clear. At Lola we're excited to
have so many areas to innovate around retailing for travel, and we're excited
to be here with so many of our airline partners who are helping us understand
from their own merchandising strategies how we can continue to evolve and be
better. We've started to lay the foundation for a lot more exciting
development. We've been testing a variety of treatments to showcase product choice.
Our approach is first of its kind, illustrating cabins by unbiased colors.
You'll notice there's more detail around the results to help travelers make fast
and smart decisions. Have you guys seen it by color before? So comparing choice
just got easier with features that allow for easy viewing of what's included in
the different products. Personalization and relevancy are not
simply buzzwords. When done well they really will increase adoption and
save travelers time. Because not all travelers are created equal, the results
you will see using Lola are highly tailored based on
how preferences are set up by each profile, and this makes everything fast
and highly productive. So again, our approach is innovative and holistic, our
technology is modern and flexible, our team a successful traffic
record of innovation and disruption and travel and technology, and these three
pillars combined with a huge market opportunity helped to create this mega
force that will allow Lola to be the fastest and most loved end-to-end
business travel product. Thank you for your time. No red light, whoo!
Good job staying on time, Krista, thank you. So I think the pitch for what Lola does seems
pretty straightforward, so I guess, I'm wondering about sort of industry
dynamics that may have changed recently that have made the industry more
receptive to the kind of offer that Lola is offering in the TMC and small to
medium sized booking space. So you had a deal, Krista, or was announced earlier
this year with Lola with Amex-- American Express global business travel.
Is there something afoot in the industry where there's reasons why this is
being more adopted and more people more interested in this?
I mean I think that
there's just, it's ripe for change. There are a lot of antiquated, outdated systems,
but I also think as the, like, online travel space has really matured, there
are a lot of companies out there today that are, you know, in chaos with their
travel programs and I think there's a real need and a demand for something that
didn't exist before. And that's a product to help people that are
smaller companies to manage their travel. So I think that's sort of a lot of
activity in that space.
We heard our panel earlier today from other, sort of
like, demand partners and they they were sort of saying you need to have a
lot of experimentation, trial and error, and you and your presentation, you had
some color as you pointed out different ways you're experimenting. Do you feel
the industry's doing enough to sort of have a circular dialogue about what's
working from the demand partners like Lola back up to the airlines?
I mean, I think there's conversation and that's great and we're
trying to kind of continue to have a seat at the table to learn more. We have
not figured it all out. It feels like nobody's quite figured it all out, so I
think collaboratively as long as we stay connected and close we're going to
continue to just evolve and learn from each other.
Okay, fantastic, Krista.
Thank you so much for the presentation. All right, Krista Pappas from Lola.com!