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- Travel trends. In 2021, Henley Vazquez noticed two trends. People were eager to travel as cities and borders opened back up, and women were still suffering the effects of the pandemic on their careers, whether they were still out of the workforce or struggling to return.
Vazquez was a two-time founder in the travel industry, and she came up with a business model that would attempt to capitalize on both of those shifts. She's now the cofounder of Fora, a gig economy-style platform for travel agents. In a traditionally analog industry—where travel agents still sometimes took down customers' credit card information on post-its—Fora built a tech platform with a travel-specific customer relationship management tool. The company raised a $13.5 million Series A round in 2022 from investors including Forerunner and Heartcore Capital.
It staffed that platform with a mostly female workforce of travel advisors, or people who book hotels and plan itineraries for travelers. Most of these advisors weren't traditional travel agents. They're the 20-somethings who were already planning trips and bachelorettes in their group chats, the retirees who specialize in empty-nester travel, and the women looking for extra income without heading back to an office. The traditional travel agency industry preferred to employ agents who booked high volumes of travel, while Fora seeks to capture the "long tail" of advisors who will book travel as a part-time gig, with a 70/30 commission split on the $1.5 million a day in travel the platform now books. Vazquez, a mother of three, argues that becoming a travel advisor can be the "new real estate" for women who want to try a new career in midlife.
The travel industry has already been thoroughly disrupted by players like Airbnb, but Vazquez argues that there's lots of room to grow in the travel agent space; only 8% of hotels worldwide are booked by travel agents and there's more social media content about travel than ever. "It's a human relationship kind of industry," she says. "Where the industry has gone wrong is assuming, 'I'm fine, I'll just filter through all this stuff online.'"
Four years after the beginning of the pandemic, women are back in the workforce in full force. But the boom in travel hasn't stopped. Travelers are booking wellness and adventure travel and seeking help from travel advisors to find more personal alternatives to, say, the Instagram-ready but crowded Amalfi Coast. "My goal is to raise the profile of this industry," Vazquez says, "for all of us."
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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