Henley Vazquez on Fora’s Future: AI, New Advisors, and the Fight Over What Counts as ‘Real’
In an exclusive conversation, Fora’s co-founder addresses industry skepticism, AI’s role in advisory work, and why she believes a new generation of advisors is reshaping the trade.
Photo: Rebe Adelaida / Unsplash
In an industry that still measures credibility by tenure, consortia affiliations, and the unspoken hierarchy of who counts as “real,” Henley Vazquez has helped build a company designed to break the mold on purpose.
Fora launched in 2021 with a simple provocation: the next wave of travel advisors won’t all come up through traditional storefront agencies or legacy host networks. Many will be career professionals—lawyers, tech operators, and media executives—building advisory businesses alongside their existing work, powered by a platform designed to accelerate selling, servicing, and scaling.
That thesis has drawn both enthusiasm and skepticism from the trade. Supporters see a badly needed infusion of new talent and new demand, while critics worry the model invites hobbyists, cheapens the profession, and creates operational noise for suppliers already stretched by volume. Vazquez knows the complaints, but she believes they misunderstand what’s actually happening.
Vazquez frames Fora less as a traditional host agency and more as a rethink of how travel advising functions—ranging from recruitment to technology to advisor engagement—work. “Much of this industry has been left in the past for quite a while,” she told Luxury Travel Report.
Fora is headquartered in New York City and backed by Thrive Capital, Insight Partners, Forerunner Ventures, and Heartcore Capital. Since launch, Fora advisors have booked more than $2 billion in travel across more than 180 countries, with growth accelerating sharply.
“It took us three years to sell $1 billion, and it took us 10 months to sell the second billion,” Vazquez said.
Modernizing the Advisor Playbook
The pitch behind Fora can sound deceptively simple—technology plus community—but Vazquez describes the company’s mission as far more comprehensive than tool-building. Modernizing, in her mind, means changing the rules of engagement for who can enter the profession and how quickly they can operate at a high level.
“We started by changing the rules of engagement for advisors,” she told LTR. “You can have a job in tech, media, or medicine and still build a serious travel business. You can do it big. You can sell $10 million a year.”
That framing, especially the idea of building an advisory business while maintaining a day job, sets off alarm bells among parts of the industry. The critique is familiar: flexibility becomes “side hustle,” and “side hustle” becomes shorthand for casual, untrained, and unreliable. Vazquez doesn’t just reject the premise; she argues it reverses the truth.
“We break out in hives when somebody says side hustle,” she said. “The woman who is a lawyer in her day job and a partner in that law firm, and also a travel advisor, is actually leveling up the profession.”
Her logic is more about reputation than about aspirational entrepreneurship. By pulling in high-performing professionals with real-world polish, she believes the advisor role starts to look more modern (and more serious) to travelers who still misunderstand what advisors do.
“These are very sophisticated people,” Vazquez added. “They just may or may not be doing travel advising full-time.”
Who Gets to Be an Advisor Now
One of the quiet tensions in travel is that “advisor” can mean everything from a leisure planner to a high-touch operator handling private aviation, safaris, and global family travel—a definition that’s further widened as new entrants join the trade. Vazquez leans into that breadth and suggests the industry will need it to become the first call for all travel spend, not just marquee vacations.
“We need to have a lot of people in our community that can plan anything,” she explained, pointing to trips ranging from three-day, all-inclusive Caribbean honeymoons to 10-person villas on the Amalfi Coast.
Asked what separates a hobbyist from a professional, she doesn’t point to full-time status. She points to behaviors: sales, judgment, and communication. “What makes someone excellent starts with sales,” Vazquez emphasized. “You can have an amazing network, but if you’re not willing to talk to them and remind them what you do, they won’t plan their trips with you.”
Second: conviction. “We look for people who have opinions,” she said—on cabins, suites, and the specific product decisions that turn a generic recommendation into a confident one.
Third: clarity and tone. “Good communication,” Vazquez said, including how advisors speak to clients and supplier partners. “We enjoy our reputation among suppliers as being known as sort of the nice people. We want to be the nice girls and guys out there.”
It’s a revealing phrase in a business still built on relationships, where responsiveness and trust matter more than scale—and where one mishandled booking can sour a partnership faster than a great one can build it.
Scaling Without Losing Trust
If the “side hustle” fear is the internal industry critique, the supplier-facing concern is operational: more new advisors can mean more mistakes, more escalations, and more strain on hotel and cruise sales teams.
Vazquez said those concerns were loudest early on. “When we started, there were a lot of question marks around everything,” she said. “People would say, ‘Henley, we know you—but what is this? And who are these people?’”
Her response is bluntly commercial: suppliers ultimately want demand, and Fora says it’s delivering demand that wasn’t previously coming through the trade. “Ultimately, what they want is heads on beds,” she said. “Whether it’s on their ship or their hotel, we are providing that and we’re providing net new business.”
“Ninety-eight percent of our advisors weren’t booking travel professionally before,” she added. In other words, her argument isn’t that Fora is competing for the same pie; it’s that the pie is getting bigger as more travelers enter the advisor ecosystem.
Asked about operational risk, Vazquez points instead to how Fora frames the role internally. “We treat our advisors as business owners. You are an entrepreneur now,” she said. “And they take this very seriously.”
Beyond the Influencer Label
Another criticism aimed at newer advisor models is that social media visibility can blur the line between influence and expertise, something Vazquez says she confronted early in Fora’s fundraising.
“A lot of initial investors were like, ‘Oh, so, like influencers who are going to book travel,’” she recalled. “And I was like, ‘No, no, no! Even with great pictures, that picture isn’t always representative of the place.’”
Her distinction isn’t follower count; it’s whether an advisor can guide decisions responsibly. “We empower people who are people of influence,” she said, “to be the trusted source for travel information.”
And she’s quick to note that the highest producers aren’t necessarily public-facing. “A lot of our top advisors have almost no presence on social media,” she said. When content does play a role, she described it as internal utility as much as marketing—room-category videos and on-the-ground visuals shared among advisors, so that product knowledge moves faster.
“The next advisor trying to understand the difference between the junior suite and the executive suite can actually watch a video,” she said.
Inside Fora’s Advisor Pipeline
For a company making the case that “a lot of people can get good at this,” training becomes existential. It’s not just educational; it’s also a way to counter industry skepticism that newer advisors lack depth.
Vazquez described a heavy cadence, with more than 80 hours of live training offered each month. The company measures impact through both engagement and outcomes.
She pointed to one area as a proof point: groups. “We did over $100 million in groups business,” she said, describing how Fora builds intensives around complex categories like safaris and group travel as those segments grow.
Drawing the Line on Automation
Few topics divide the advisor community right now as sharply as AI—and Vazquez is unapologetic about how deeply she wants it embedded into advisory work.
“Where should it improve the advisor’s workflows? Literally everywhere,” she told LTR.
She rattled off examples, including price monitoring, AI summaries of supplier notes and advisor reviews, itinerary generation, and an agent-assist layer meant to live inside daily workflows. She also pointed to last summer’s acquisition of Legends, an AI-powered data platform, as part of that strategy.
But she draws a clear line at replacing the human advisor when it matters most: personalization and problem-solving. Her test for AI-generated itineraries is simple: “Look through it and find the thing that’s not true.”
AI isn’t there when travel breaks, she added. “ChatGPT is not helping you when you’ve lost your flight, or when you don’t like your room,” she said. “ That’s where you really need a human on your side.”
Still, she pushes back against the industry’s tendency to romanticize a human-only model. “Sometimes our industry leans toward the idea that only the human matters,” she said. “To me, it’s about the intersection.”
The New Growth Curve
The long-held idea that it takes years to build a meaningful book is something Fora is clearly trying to compress. Vazquez cited the classic benchmark: “What they used to say is it takes an advisor around three years to get to $1 million [sold] if they’re doing this full time.”
She said Fora is seeing faster trajectories, especially when advisors actively use the platform’s tools and community. And she described what she believes is a structural advantage: not needing to hire as early.
“They don’t have to go out and hire an assistant when they’ve sold a million dollars in business,” she said, “because they’re able to lean on the platform to do a lot of the work for them.”
Behind the scenes, she said Fora is building more advisor-facing analytics to make performance legible. “We’re actually going to soon be launching a dashboard that the advisors can access,” she said, including income and repeat-client signals to help advisors run their businesses with clearer targets.
Bigger Network, Bigger Business
The question many fast-growing networks eventually face is whether scale erodes quality. Vazquez says the opposite is happening—and points to Fora’s tracking of community health.
“We monitor the health of the community by looking at two things: the number of clients and booking value per client and per trip,” she said. “Typically, what you see is that as a network expands, the quality decreases. But what we’ve seen is that, on average, they’re selling more to more people and the value of each trip is growing.”
She’s careful not to define value solely by price point. Fora encourages advisors to become the default for a traveler’s full range of spend, including sports trips or smaller bookings that clients might otherwise handle themselves.
Designing the “Why You” Factor
To give advisors a stronger “why you” story, Fora has leaned into brand moments and access plays, some tied to major events, others built as travel-only experiences.
She cited The Fora Beach Club, a partnership with The Shelborne during Art Basel and a multi-day retreat concept with Design Hotels in Puglia. “Those kinds of things are another way of making sure they’re always adding value,” she said.
She also flagged a new consumer-brand partnership she sees as a turning point. “We’ve just announced our first major brand partnership with Away,” she said. “We are the official travel partner of Away.”
To Vazquez, it’s validation—an external consumer brand signaling that advisors remain central to modern travel. “When you’re buying this luggage,” she said, “you should really think about booking your trip with an advisor.”
Outcomes Over Optics
The debate around Fora, like many new entrants, often gets stuck on optics: part-time advisors, AI tooling, and new-school recruiting.
For Vazquez, the conversation should focus on outcomes instead—higher-quality clients, faster learning curves, stronger demand, and an advisor experience that reflects how travelers actually buy today.
“Don’t get left behind,” she said. “But also keep the stuff that’s of value to you.”
