We're thrilled to announce our $60 million Series B and C investment rounds, led by Thrive Capital and Insight Partners, with participation by previous investors including Forerunner Ventures and Heartcore Capital, to modernize the travel industry for good. This milestone reflects how much we've achieved in just three years and is only possible thanks to our dedicated team members, our global community of thousands of entrepreneurs building their travel businesses on Fora, our partners, and our investors. This is an inflection for our industry writ large worth reflecting on.
Entrepreneurship is the new American dream
America was built by entrepreneurs. Yet somewhere along the way, the lure of entrepreneurship lost ground to the security of working for Megacorps. We became physically tethered to our desks, living out our adventures in our dreams and in a few weeks every year in accordance with our vacation policies.
The pandemic changed all of that. Labor dislocation — 1.5 million women left the workforce over this period of time — forced us to reassess our priorities. Many of us lost jobs, others had to scale back to take care of loved ones or educate their children. We learned new ways to learn and new ways to work.
And after the acute phase subsided, America responded to all of the trauma and the dislocation — out of desire or out of necessity — by starting new businesses. Millions of people started pursuing a passion with the flexibility and fulfillment only possible with an entrepreneurial career*.
Four years later, Americans are still starting way more new businesses than prior to the pandemic. We are becoming a nation of entrepreneurs, once again.
And yet, in 2021, a record number of people were leaving the travel industry — retiring, getting corporate jobs. Tech was virtually non-existent, and barriers for entry high, which seemed out of kilter with the broader trends.
Enter Fora
Between my time at onefinestay and Henley’s years of experience as a travel advisor, we knew there was a better way. A better way to train those interested in the field and provide them with the resources to build not just a hobby, but a real business. A better way to scale sales and marketing for travel providers in a sector that’s historically fragmented, hard to access, and expensive. And a better way for advisors to offer personalized experiences that embrace technology, rather than manual processes, that make consumers want to come back to their travel advisors for all of their travels, big and small.
With today’s news, we are confident our thesis will continue to be proven correct: by empowering a growing community to build careers they love, lowering the barrier to start and stay a travel entrepreneur, we’ve created a new channel of distribution for our partners that provides the best of all worlds — higher quality clients at a lower overall cost in a single channel — at scale. These entrepreneurs are launching modern travel businesses in a way that wasn’t previously possible, which has enabled us to deliver a pace of sales no one has previously delivered. This saves our travel partners the cost and complexity of fragmented distribution, which allows them to ensure every Fora client is prioritized. It’s a win-win-win for our advisors, clients and partners — as well as the travel industry as a whole.
As of today, the Fora community includes new travel entrepreneurs in every US state and 92 countries around the world. Collectively, we have booked over 2 million nights and over $1 billion in sales. These entrepreneurs come from a diversity of backgrounds, full time and part time, early career to nearing retirement. Our community includes pediatric nurses, CMOs, CPAs, former McKinsey consultants, educators, product managers, lawyers and Olympians. At last survey, 97% of our advisors reported never having been travel advisors before, in turn bringing tens of thousands of new customers along with them.
Travel is a $1.8 trillion** market dominated by channels that are inferior for the travel provider and for the end customer. And yet travel advisors currently deliver far less than 10% of hotel bookings. Supported by technology, we see no natural limit to the number of people that can launch a new career in travel.
Humans AND technology: the best of both worlds
At Fora, we sit uniquely at the intersection of tradition and technology — one foot in a heritage industry, the other in Silicon Valley. From our vantage point, we see a historic opportunity to transform the entire travel booking experience, leveraging the best of humans and the best of technology, including AI.
While working with an advisor will nearly always deliver a superior on-the-ground experience, the process of booking with one is still full of friction — slow responses, offline back-and-forth and opaque systems. Not to mention, many still believe that it’s a costly indulgence to work with a travel advisor, rather than a time and cost-saving measure. As a result, many travelers opt for convenience over quality, and advisors are relegated to a small subset of high-ticket trips.
The result is an inconsistent traveler experience, and often one that feels like reinventing the wheel with every new trip. No single channel offers a seamless, fast and comprehensive end-to-end experience for all trip needs.
Travel advisors need platform technology that extends to the traveler to match the convenience and selection of an OTA to compete against the OTA.
OTAs lack the curation, expertise and trust that humans bring to successfully compete against the agency.
Travel advisors will require the latest AI technology to access the depth of traveler data and level of personalization required to deliver a best-in-class booking experience, and to make the work of an advisor more efficient and more enjoyable.
We expect the coming technological revolution to remove the administrative burden that has historically limited advisors’ scalability. With most planning and executional tasks streamlined by Fora’s platform, advisors can grow their businesses 10x — serving more clients, spending more time marketing, building bigger books of business and unlocking new levels of earning potential.
All of this benefit will accrue to the traveler, who for the first time can access the travel experience that only an advisor can provide, but across price points and trip types — from inspiration and planning to on-trip support and post-travel engagement. The result will be a seamless blend of speed, trust and the human touch every time you travel.
This is the future we are building for our community. And in doing so, we will ensure a vibrant, modern travel industry — powered by people, amplified by technology — for generations to come.
Plan your next trip with a Fora Advisor, or become a modern travel advisor today.
* Source: Census.gov
** Commissionable travel excluding flights based on internal estimates
