Live From ILTM: Fora’s Mission to Modernize the Travel Advisor Model

Fora Travel is proving that the travel advisor industry can evolve beyond traditional gatekeeping while maintaining professional excellence. In this ILTM (International Luxury Travel Market) episode—recorded live in Cannes—Henley Vazquez, cofounder of Fora Travel, joins Afar cofounder Joe Diaz to share how she’s transforming a legacy industry by saying “yes” to a new generation of travel entrepreneurs who don’t fit the traditional full-time advisor mold.

Henley discusses her journey from running a traditional agency to launching Fora in 2021, frustrated by having to turn away talented people who couldn’t commit to full-time travel planning due to other careers or family obligations. The conversation covers Fora’s innovative technology like “bookable quotes” that update in real-time, price monitoring AI that alerts clients to rate changes, and how the platform turns advisors into “wingpeople” rather than middlemen.

Henley also explores the challenge of maintaining community intimacy while scaling to thousands of advisors and why transparency and human connection remain essential even as AI transforms the industry.

Transcript

Joe: I’m Joe Diaz, Afar cofounder, and welcome to View From Afar, a podcast that spotlights the people and the ideas shaping the future of travel. In this special series, I’m coming to you live from ILTM, one of the most important travel shows that happens every year.

ILTM stands for the International Luxury Travel Market, and the show takes place in a fittingly luxurious city, Cannes, France. The conversations that happen here influence how we think about travel for years to come. Afar editor in chief, Julia Cosgrove, and I sat down with leaders across the travel industry, from visionary hoteliers to destination innovators, to discuss the trends, challenges, and ideas that are driving hospitality forward. We want to understand what truly motivates these leaders, how their personal stories, values and visions shape the experiences they create for travelers.

Be sure to follow the show to hear all our conversations from ILTM.

In this episode, I’m sitting down with Henley Vazquez, the co-founder of Fora travel. Henley helped launch Fora in twenty twenty one with a mission to modernize the travel advisor model and make it accessible to a new generation of entrepreneurs. A longtime advisor herself, she’s been rethinking what professional travel planning looks like in the digital age, building a platform that combines human expertise with smart technology and community support. Under her leadership, Fora has grown rapidly, attracting thousands of advisors and redefining what it means to build a career in travel. Today, we talk about Henley as empowering the next wave of travel entrepreneurs and why personal connection still matters in a tech driven industry.

Super thrilled to have you.

Henley: Thank you.

Joe: Fora in the house. Henley Vazquez in the house. You guys rock. It’s been fun to watch the trajectory. So let’s start. Tell me a little bit about the gap you saw in the traditional advisor space that made you say, you know what? I think the world needs Fora Travel.

Henley: Yeah, well, I mean, it always sounds so presumptuous, right? The world needs Fora Travel, but I’ve been a travel advisor my whole career. And what I did know is I was tired of saying “no” to people. So I owned another agency. I was sort of constantly coming across people who would say, I would, you know, they knew a lot about travel. They were kind of like bad clients because they knew a little too much, but they weren’t able to commit to a full-time job either, because they were already working, doing something else. They were taking care of younger children and needed part of their day to do that. They had other commitments. And so I just found myself part of the gatekeeping of this industry that I didn’t like, which was saying, no, if you’re not just like me, if you’re not just able to work the way that I do, you actually can’t do this job at all.

So COVID, pandemic, everything shuts down. I’m sort of rethinking what does the world look like this afterwards? Knowing I wanted to stay in travel, knowing travel would come back, but also thinking it was time to maybe try something a little bit different. And that was really where the idea of Fora emerged. How do you say yes and give opportunities to people, and in turn also give opportunities to more clients to engage with a travel advisor?

Joe: Do you think of yourself in the company as a way to essentially democratize this space?

Henley: Yeah, I do, and I think that’s not always a popular thing to say.

Joe: But you’re disrupting, you’re disrupting the space too, right?

Henley: So I think we’re adding to the space. I would like to think that, you know, rising tides lift all boats. And we want the travel advisor industry to become even more of an obvious way to plan the best trip that you can.

However, in order to do that, we have to have more people in this industry because actually we own quite a small segment of what most bookings are. And we also have to book more than just ultra luxury. So my advisors, yes, I’ve never seen so many private jets booked in my life, but we’re also selling Disney and all-inclusives and lifestyle hotels and small little boutique properties. And I think in order for travelers to find the advisor industry reflective of them, we also have to have that diversity on this side.

Joe: I’m actually surprised because when I heard about the idea and heard about the model in a space that’s pretty traditional, um, I was like, these guys are going to get some blowback, you know, and you heard a little bit about that. But, candidly, and you, I’m sure, hear more about it than I do. But like, not as much as I really thought. How have you been able to manage that so well? Is that fair?

Henley: Yeah. I mean, look, I am a person. I like to get along with everyone. I have certainly had to grow a thicker skin, and I think so have our advisors. When somebody says, “Oh, you’re part of Fora you’re new to the industry, maybe you’re not as good as I am at what I do,” I like to remind people we were all beginners once. Even those of us who have done this for a very long time. And frankly, the numbers speak for themselves. So while you know, with our travel partners, certainly at first there was a little bit like, wait, Henley, what are you doing this time? But I think once they started seeing the sales come in, they were pretty excited about it.

Joe: And so tell us a little bit about, how does Fora make money? What is the, how does that all work?

Henley: Well in that way, in the same way as every single other agency here. So we are a host agency. Our advisors apply. If they are admitted, they join the platform, they start their training, and when they earn a commission, we handle all of their back office. So when they earn the commission, then a portion goes to them and a portion stays with your host agency. So very similar to all the other host agencies that are here. There is a membership fee to join the platform, but that is I think it’s two point nine nine a year right now.

Joe: It’s pretty nominal.

Henley: Yeah, it’s pretty nominal. That’s really just kind of a little skin in the game to make sure you’re serious about this. So we may be non-traditional in certain ways, but the economics of it, very traditional.

Joe: And I should have probably said this at the beginning. Full disclosure: I am a Fora Travel advisor.

Henley: Wait, I didn’t, I didn’t know this.

Joe: I actually had coffee with Evan, your cofounder, about a year ago now, and we were just talking about things we could do together and love the brand. He’s like, I love Afar, you know? I was like, let me test out the platform a little bit. And so he gave me the keys to the car and I’ve been using it to, to book a little bit for my family and friends.

And it’s super easy, super intuitive. You can tell you’ve put a lot of time and energy into the platform. And so like software development and building this platform has sure been pretty incredibly complex.

Henley: It’s very complex. And the more that you do it, the more complexity you find, I think. It’s an industry with sort of legacy technology. And I think technology is sort of a reach to even call it that. So when you try to rethink and build something from the ground up, that’s going to be obvious and intuitive, you know, on par with consumer grade technology, you really find a lot of stuff that is just dead, broken in this industry, and you try to fix it, but it certainly has complexity.

Joe: Yeah. A chief product officer of ours used the term technical debt.

Henley: I like that one.

Joe: You’ve grown fast. Bring in like thousands of advisors onto the platform and bringing new advisors into the industry. What’s been the hardest part of scaling that community for Fora?

Henley: Well, what’s not hard, ironically, is finding great people. And so I think something that amazes me on a daily basis, because I get a report every night of the bookings that were filed that day, is how much new people are still coming in and just booking really incredible trips. So what’s not so hard is finding great people. I think what’s hard is as you get bigger, how do you build fast enough? Because we would like to move at a pace that’s even quicker than we currently do. We have about one hundred and eighty people on staff, half of them are engineers, and we still aren’t going as quickly as we would like to. So there’s that.

And then I think the other hard part is community. So you’re becoming bigger. How do you make sure that everyone coming through the door still finds their people? And Evan, actually, my co-founder, has a great analogy of: he went to the University of Michigan. It’s a big school. There’s a lot of pride in the school, but you have to find a smaller community within it, whether it’s your sport or your major or your fraternity. You find these smaller groups. So I think as we’ve scaled, we’ve thought a lot about how we keep the closeness of the community and the collaboration, even while the community grows.

Joe: So give me a couple of specific examples, because we have a lot of listeners out there, a lot of that are travel advisors, that are entrepreneurs that are, you know, have their own businesses. What are the ways that you do that?

Henley: So I think one of it is in-person events. You really, even though a lot of our lives are online. I mean, I think all of us felt that way after so many zoom meetings during COVID. We have to connect in person. So for all of our fans and our in-person events, we have people come together, meet each other in real life and find a way to sort of stay in touch after we have chapters. So we’re in 92 countries in all 50 US states.

Any place, now that we have above a certain amount of advisors, we’re starting chapters. So one advisor actually becomes the chapter leader. We do a whole interview process, and then she’ll organize everything from events with our travel partners to just a fun day of hiking or co-working, ways to build community that’s within the people that are in that area. And then there’s stuff like this where you have your group that’s here at ILTM, and we’re going to do our events together. We’re talking, we’re collaborating while we’re here. And then they take that back to the communities that they live in.

Joe: And you’re doing your own kind of big annual event as well, right? Was this the first year you did it?

Henley: No, this was our fourth year. No, but it’s funny that you say that because every year feels like the first year, because a big event is never easy to put on. But our first year was about 40 advisors at the Hoxton in Williamsburg in New York City. And we were like, whoa, this is that was a lot of work. This year, I think, was the 800-some people in the Knockdown Center out in Queens. And so it is a it has grown quite a bit. And we’re thinking about again, how do you continue to scale that? We know more people want to be attending this event. How do you keep the vibes while also allowing more space for people to come in and connect?

Joe: Obviously, the space is evolving, like everything. As you think about kind of this advisor space, what does that evolution for the advisor look like as you kind of peel back the tea leaves and look into the future?

Henley: The biggest thing that I’m seeing right now is obviously tech is impacting this world quite a bit, like AI is here. And I think quite a good thing we use this in everything we’re building. We want to offload as much as we can of sort of administrative tasks to technology. We want to use our data in the right ways to make smarter suggestions and decisions. But I think the biggest evolution of the advisor is going to be having all this tech in the background, but really empowering them to put their best foot forward as a human. So we released something called Bookable Quote. Bookable Quote gives an advisor the ability to create a quote, okay, we’re in Cannes, where would you like to stay? I’ll send you a quote for the Martinez, for The Majestic, and for The Carlton.

Now, you may not have time to look at it right away when you’re, you know, it’s Saturday night, you’re finally tucking in to bed, and you turn to your partner and say, okay, but like, where do we really want to stay? The old way was: Okay, great. We’ve decided on the Carlton. Now let me email my travel agent, and maybe your travel agent comes back to you and says it’s not the same price anymore, blah blah blah, blah, blah.

What we’ve done is created something that then updates real time. So in real time you, it can only go to you, this quote, you have to authenticate when you log in that it is you. But you can go ahead and you can actually book the room you want. If the price has changed, you’ll find out and be able to make that decision right then. And then your advisor gets that notification.

So we want to create technology that offloads the, like annoying analog relationship between a traveler and an advisor. What optimizes the human part, which is then I see you did the Carlton. I actually noticed that the room that you booked, listen, that one actually doesn’t fit a crib if you’re traveling with a baby. Let’s talk about what the better one is. So all of these things are things where the human can shine, but we want the traveler to be able to engage kind of all the time with their advisor in a way that works for them.

Joe: Here’s what I love about this is that you look at the advisor as a wingman, not a middleman.

Henley: Yes, I like that.

Joe: And it feels like because I agree, there’s a lot of things as a consumer of travel, then I can probably do on my own, and I don’t need somebody in the middle. But there is a time when I do need that assist person, that wing person, the expert in the room. And so it feels like the way you’re setting up the platform is to just enable that.

Henley: I think I’m going to steal your phrase wingman, not a middleman. I really like that. Or wing woman, because we are eighty six percent women.

And that’s actually something. I think we just have such a diversity of people on the platform. It creates that really vibrant community. Men, women, parents, older, younger, singles, you name it.

Joe: And so now, what are some of the big bets you’re placing to kind of push the company forward?

Henley: It really is on more of this consumer facing technology. And again, this isn’t to go around the advisor. This is actually to enable the advisor. So Bookable Quote, one of the first things that we did will now evolve ultimately into you as a traveler, being able to log in to your advisor’s portal and actually go in and say, I haven’t even told you yet that I want to go to Cannes, but I can go in and I can search and I can find and your advisor will get that notification. Hey, this is what they’re doing. So then they can immediately reach out and become that best wingman for you to plan the rest of the trip, or what do you want to add on afterwards? Maybe you weren’t sure. We want everything to be as seamless as possible.

The other thing I think we’re really betting on is transparency. We have on all the bookings that go through our platform, we have a price monitoring AI that checks the price of everything. If your room rate changes and it’s more than 5% or $50, we’re going to let you know. We’re going to let your advisor know, and then your advisor can come to you and say, you know what, that room you booked, it’s now €600 a night instead of €700. Do you want to keep the 700? Because actually, you could book a junior suite for the same price. Or do you want to change? I’ll rebook you. And I think that that makes people a little bit nervous. But are you just looking for a deal? No. We’re looking to be the absolute best advocate for our clients. And if we don’t create technology that does the best thing for our travelers, they will find another way to plan a trip.

Joe: So Afar reaches many of these same curious, passionate travelers that Fora advisors serve. Where do you see opportunity for alignment or shared purpose between media and the advisor communities?

Henley: Well, so I started my career in media. So I have a big love of content. And I, I think what we’re seeing right now, in the same way that we see some of these sort of like golden age of travel things coming back with trains and yachts and people interested in more slow travel. With media, I think we’re seeing how much people still value great content and print media. And so for us, I really see media as a lot of the inspiration that then leads into sort of the planning process.

So when I think about the planning process, I think of travel as inspiration for travel, sort of activation of travel, actually planning it and doing it, and then the nostalgia that happens afterwards, which often leads back into the inspiration and the activation. And to me, media is part of all of that. And it’s not just print media, it’s also social media, but it’s all of these sort of inspirational elements that tell a traveler where they may want to think of next, and then they’re talking with their advisor who may say, I know you read that that is the hottest place to go in The New York Times, but actually, let me tell you, you are not going to like that. That’s not going to be right for you. So we’re here as sort of your gut check, as well as your person who’s going to make sure it happens. But the media, to me, is an absolutely essential part of how we get people to dream.

Joe: Fantastic. Well, thank you for being here. You heard it here. First wing woman, not middle woman.

Henley: I love it.

Joe: Right here live in Cannes. Thank you Henley. Thank you Fora and congrats on all the success.

Henley: Thanks so much. Thanks for having us.

Joe: Thanks for joining us for this special episode of View From Afar, recorded live at ILTM in Cannes. In the show notes, you’ll find links to everything we discussed today, as well as Fora Travels website and social media handles. And be sure to follow along this week to hear more interviews with industry experts.

You can find more Views From Afar on Afar.com, and be sure to follow us on Instagram and TikTok — we’re at @AfarMedia.

If you’ve enjoyed today’s exploration, I hope you’ll come back for more great interviews. Subscribing always makes that easy. And be sure to rate and review the show on your favorite podcast platform. It helps other travelers find it.

This has been View From Afar, a production of Afar Media. The podcast is produced by Aislyn Greene and Nikki Galteland, with assistance from Jen Flowers, Julia Cosgrove and Joe Diaz. Music composition from Epidemic Sound.

This podcast is part of the Airwave Media Podcast network. Visit Airwavemedia.com to listen and subscribe to their other fine shows like Culture Kids and The Explorers Podcast.