On Sept. 29, Booking Holdings debuted Lola, an agentic AI assistant focused primarily on booking experiences, including restaurants, sports and attractions. Lola also has a tiered membership program that unlocks discounts with partner companies. Editor at large Robert Silk spoke with Steve Hafner, the former Kayak CEO who is Lola's co-founder, about Lola and what makes it stand out.
Steve Hafner
Q: What problem are you trying to solve with Lola? What niche in the marketplace is it going after?
A: It's your personal AI assistant for anything worth doing. What most platforms are doing today is they're going to a number of other vendors who are not comprehensive, and they're doing it via search forms, so not natural language, and if they're using an LLM [large language model], they're not being able to book it. So we're trying to eliminate all those trade-offs that people are making today to have one optimal experience.
Q: Who else is doing something like this?
A: Muse [Meta's new AI assistant] and the other LLMs are trying to be agentic across every horizontal surface, and they don't really have partnerships with many companies. What we're trying to do at Lola is go deep vertically in the experience category. We're doing it permission-based and via APIs, and we have bookability.
Q: Does Lola focus on planning as much as it does on booking?
A: We're not focusing on complex planning. You can do that with Lola, and we do a great job at it. But we're more about: What do I want to do this weekend? It's frequent occasions, frequent experiences in your home market. We do travel, and we do travel really well, but that's not the focus.
Q: How does Lola fit into the larger milieu of Booking Holdings?
A: CEO Glenn Fogel has been talking about the connected trip of Booking Holdings for a while, about bringing all these different verticals together, and they haven't really connected it yet, especially for experiences, for dining reservations, sporting events, concerts. So we're focusing on that first. We have access to all the other capabilities within the group, so we can do hotels really well. We're also taking a different approach. We're doing it from a consumer vantage point of, you're a member of Lola, and the reason you're a member is because we want to personalize the recommendations for you. And then commercially, we want you to pay for that membership and be loyal to our product, and we'll pass all the savings back to you that we would have made on these transactions if we were commission based. So, it's a different commercial model.
Q: You've compared the model to credit card loyalty programs; explain that.
A: The companies that have gotten loyalty down really well are the credit card companies because they know if you pay for a privilege, sometimes $1,000, you get access to better rates and better perks and amenities. At Lola we want to capture some of that loyalty, but we want to do it at a different price point. The VIP membership is $300. You can stack it with any credit card program you already have, and we have much more comprehensiveness in terms of the content. If you're an Amex person, you're seeing Resy, but you can't book OpenTable. Lola will be comprehensive.
Q: But you're not doing flights and car rentals.
A: No, they're both on the roadmap. But there's other stuff that's way more exciting to us to do first. Right now, we've got hotels and restaurants stood up on the site. Experiences are next, so that's concerts and sporting events and things to do. And then after that, we'll start playing around with flights.
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This interview was edited for length and clarity.