The Lola travel app brings the intimacy of the travel agent to the convenience of the smartphone
Boston, MA—June 15, 2016—StartHub.org, the comprehensive, centralized online platform to connect and support Boston’s startup community, today announced Lola, a new kind of travel company that provides on-demand, personal travel service through a smartphone app, as the June 2016 Startup to Watch. The Boston-based startup is recognized for its innovation and for drawing the most attention from visitors to StartHub during the month of May.
Lola, founded in 2015, instantly connects consumers to a dedicated team of travel consultants who find hotels, research vacation dreams, book flights, and help with anything else a customer needs. Users of the app can also receive assistance during their trip. While currently free, Lola is an invite-only membership service. Downloading the app without an invitation will add customer to a waitlist. An annual membership fee will be introduced in the near future. Membership perks include unlimited, on-demand personal travel care. Exclusive partnerships with select companies, institutions, and organizations are also available.
Co-founders Paul English, CEO, and Bill O’Donnell, CTO, named Lola after the shorthand for longitude and latitude, in the spirit of making premium travel care, like seaborne navigation, easier. Through their experience at Kayak, Paul and Bill were behind one of the most successful online tools for helping travelers book their flights, hotels, rooms, and rentals cars. With Lola, they are bringing the same online disruption to the personal service of travel agencies. The 40-person company, recently announced a $19.7 million Series A round.
“We are excited to join the many StartHub visitors who have taken interest in Lola’s promise to bring customer service back to the online travel industry and we are proud to honor Lola as the StartHub June 2016 Startup to Watch,” said Melissa Yee, Editor of StartHub. “Co-founders Paul and Bill have years of experience changing the way consumers have approached booking their travel online. Their latest venture seeks to take that same technology to reintroduce the comfort and security of a personal travel agent, in your pocket.”
Each week, StartHub will hand-select a promising Greater Boston area-based startup to be featured across the StartHub website, weekly newsletter, and social media channels. The Featured Startup that draws the most interest will be announced as that month’s StartHub Startup to Watch. Qualifying startups must have a published profile on the StartHub platform. To add your startup’s free profile to StartHub and to qualify for StartHub Startups to Watch, click here.
StartHub was developed in a public-private partnership between the City of Boston and Venture Café, a non-profit organization based in Cambridge, Massachusetts that looks to build more cohesive entrepreneurial communities, and Gust, the world’s largest network of founders and professionals focused on early-stage investment. StartHub is sponsored by IBM and was launched using IBM’s Bluemix Cloud technology.
About StartHub
StartHub.org is a comprehensive, centralized online platform designed to connect, support, and grow Greater Boston’s world-class technology and early-stage community. Developed in a public-private partnership between the City of Boston, Venture Café, Gust, IBM, and a wide number of partners from Boston’s startup community, StartHub will serve as Greater Boston’s homepage for the startup ecosystem.
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