Travel startup Fora wants to reinvent the travel agency

As pandemic restrictions eased, travel costs began to rise again. According to FocusWright’s latest US travel market report, total bookings in the United States were It grew 67 percent to $272.6 billion in 2021 and is expected to reach $461.7 billion in 2025 — up 13 percent from 2019 levels.

But how consumers plan and book their trips in 2018 It looks different than it did in 2019. According to the American Association of Travel Advisors, nearly half of travelers (44%) think they are more likely to use a travel advisor to plan and travel. The epidemic will end.

With women losing 395,000 jobs by 2020, consumer demand for travel agents has inspired the three co-founders of travel tech startup Fora to create a new travel agency that allows anyone interested in travel to earn money. Consultant.

In the year Launched in 2021, Fora is a tech-powered travel agency that provides resources for part-time or full-time employment as a travel consultant. The Fora platform includes training for the advisor community – 97% of Fora advisors have never sold travel before – as well as access to a supplier center, commission tracking and content creation and marketing tools.

Today, New York-based Fora is announcing a $13.5 million Series A round led by Heartcore Capital and Forerunner. Funding will follow in November 2021 with $5 million in seed funding.

“People are traveling again, and now travel consultants are really needed to understand the world of travel,” said Henley Vazquez, founder and travel consultant at Fora. “It’s complicated; everybody wants to get back there. Also, too many women are out of the labor market… and [selling travel] It looks like a fun, flexible, fun job.

But for women seeking a career as a travel consultant—especially in a flexible position—finding part-time work is difficult, Vazquez says. ” in addition [the travel agent technology] It’s scary, and the margins are small. But what if we could solve that? This was the origin of Fora’s idea.

‘Business-in-a-box’

Vazquez co-founded Foran with co-founder and CTO Jake Peters and co-founder Evan Frank, who previously founded rental provider Onefinestay.

The Fora Travel Advisors platform consists of several components: one is a training program for certifying agents, and the other is for bookings and commissions. Additional features include marketing tools to help advisors generate interest — Peters said Fora feeds advisors pre-made content to help with marketing efforts — as well as a community function where advisors can collaborate and share ideas.

“Our philosophy is that there is enough travel cost that it doesn’t need to be competitive among any travel advisors in the community,” Peters said.

Not being an influencer.

Henley Vazquez – Fora

“We’re trying to make advisors’ jobs amazing and help people make a secure living.”

Frank added: “This is a business in a box. It’s not just about the technology, it’s about the platform – even if it’s a small part of it – but how it integrates the training that we provide and the tools that we provide to the consultants, who may be outside of the platform. ” For example, he continues, Fora enables content creation and publishing, allowing advisors to create their own travel guides.

‘Managed OTA’

Since its inception, Fora counts nearly 500 consultants on the platform, as well as 30,000-odd people on its waiting list.

Facebook marketing was the primary tool for reaching Fora travel advisors. The target customer is often “someone in their neighborhood or club that they go on trips with … someone you meet before you go somewhere,” says Frank.

“What we found is something very different [people self-identify as] – People who are interested in sharing their travel knowledge in one way or another. But some people want to share that knowledge without doing the work,” he says.

Vazquez added: “It’s not so much about being an influencer… We’re really against that.” We focus on finding people who want to participate and planning trips, not just talking about them.

To evaluate those on the waiting list, Fora uses a variety of surveys and scoring systems to determine who is interested in the job class.

So far, Fora is hiring 50 to 100 mentors per month, but over the next six to 12 months, the startup plans to expand its network to anyone willing and able to get involved.

“We see the future as a platform-type business rather than a hosting agency that severely limits numbers,” says Frank.

Peters The latest funding, he says, has confirmed Fora’s hypothesis. “We didn’t know there were all these people who wanted to do this, and we didn’t know we could make that group of people successful. So we feel like we’ve proven that to this point.

“The next step for us is turning this into a holistic experience for our advisors … building operations to support what’s called a host agency at scale.”

In addition to enhancing Fora’s marketing capabilities and growing its training programs, Fora will use the funds to refine its operations, support additional consultants and build its offering.

“I think connecting the supply is the hardest part because it’s such a messy thing,” Peters said. “Whether you’re talking to OTAs or someone trying to enable online booking, it’s very complicated.”

Fora currently has exclusive partnerships with Four Seasons, Rosewood, Hilton, InterContinental Hotels Group, Hyatt and others, but the platform intends to move directly to direct relationships.

The ultimate goal is to “build something that combines the best of OTAs with the best bits of agency,” says Frank. In other words, a “human operated OTA.