No. Channels connect into a network. If Alice has a channel with Bob, and Bob has one with Carol, Alice can pay Carol through Bob, without ever having met Carol.
A secret that makes it all or nothing
Carol creates a random secret and gives Alice its hash inside an invoice. Alice offers Bob a payment that Bob can claim only by revealing the secret. Bob offers Carol the same deal. When Carol claims the payment, the secret is revealed, and Bob uses it to claim the payment from Alice. These locked payments are called HTLCs, hashed time locked contracts.
Either every hop completes, or none does. Bob can never take Alice's money without paying Carol, and if anything fails, time locks return the funds.
Onion routing
The route is wrapped in layers of encryption. Each hop only learns where the payment came from and where to send it next, not who sent it first or who receives it last. Routing nodes may charge a small fee for the service.
▶ SEE IT IN THE MACHINEAt the LIGHTNING NETWORK stop, payments hop from channel to channel in a flash.