The average citizen of the United States will hardly ever travel. Sure, people travel for vacation and sometimes for business, but typically people don’t travel often, unless they’re profession centers around it or they’re wealthy enough to afford to travel casually. So, for those of us who don’t do it often, it can often seem like a big task to make travel plans.
Obviously, it’s terribly easy to make plans to drive to another city that’s no more than 10 hours away. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out how long it will take to fill your car up with gas a few times and put in an address into the GPS on your phone (Google Maps is my personal favorite). However, planning a trip to Las Vegas for a week with several different people, assuming you don’t live in Nevada or the surrounding area, can be a daunting. I would know – I’ve done just that.
The first problem arises when you have a lot of people. If you’re on a budget, you look for a place that offers a package deal. If you can’t find one, then you’re looking at a trip that could be twice the price otherwise. The problem seems like it would have an obvious solution, but my friends and I don’t travel often. So, we didn’t know where to look for deals for our flight or our hotel rooms. The next problem that arises is the quality of the place you’ve booked. No one wants to spend money on a place that’s not worth staying at. So, you have to look through reviews and hopefully get a glimpse of the experience you’ll soon have. After you assess its quality, you need to assess its location. You don’t want to have to take an Uber 30 minutes to all the places of interest because you didn’t choose a hotel nearby.
All of these steps in the process of making travel plans take time and a bit of work, especially when you’re not used to it.
Lucky for us, we live in an age of smartphones and high-speed internet. As a result, a certain someone has created a certain app to help you make your travel experience go a lot smoother. That certain someone is Paul English, and that certain app is Lola.
Lola was created to make traveling easier for people who are travel pros. While I think that’s a great idea, I see a great potential for this app in the hands of a casual traveler. But we’ll save that until the end. Lola is an app that allows you to chat with consultants who can help you with every aspect of your traveling plans. It also uses a certain amount of AI to establish your traveling preferences.
”Lola is here to make every facet of travel easier for the road warrior. Lola gets to know you from the moment you open the app, giving you personalized travel options and a personal assistant available 24/7.”
There are undoubtedly a good amount of people who consider themselves a “road warrior.” They travel all the time either for business or pleasure. But I see two problems that Lola can solve. The first problem and the one Lola is targeted at, is the road warrior’s problem. Their problem is traveling all the time and always having to repeat the same tedious process of making plans. The second problem, the one that the creators of Lola did not take into account, is the problem of the casual traveler. Our problem is that we have little experience making travel plans so when we finally get around to it, it is almost foreign to us. Lola may not be of use to someone who is a modern-day hermit and only travels extensively once every few years, but it can be useful to a road warrior or a young person who travels casually. I emphasize young because Lola could be useful to a casual traveler over time.
“Your travel preferences are unique to you. By analyzing your likes and dislikes, we create personalized travel results just for you . . . Our travelers hit the road worry-free with 24/7 support from Lola′s world-class team who make sure everything goes smoothly along the way . . . All of your hotel and flight bookings in one place so you always know where you need to be.”
As someone who doesn’t consider themselves a road warrior, I would love to use this app the next time I take an extensive trip. It’s hard enough to travel to other states here in the U.S., I can’t even imagine what it would be like to travel constantly to other countries. The way I see it, Lola can benefit a great deal of people. Maybe next time I suggest a vacation idea to my friends, I won’t hesitate to do so, because Lola can help me with all the tedious factors that make up the core of a solid travel plan.
