When people ask me um what's the most important thing about fora, they say it's gotta be the technology, but actually it's the community that you really cannot replicate. So the community has all this shared wisdom, advisors are talking about groups, it's very temporal. This kind of stuff doesn't exist on the internet, but it exists in our community. So how do we make this available to other people in our community at scale?
Hello everyone, and welcome to a live recording of Travel Trends in downtown New York City. I'm here at Foras headquarters, and we're going to be speaking to my good friend and colleague Jake Peters, the co-founder and chief product and technology officer at Fora. Now, I just came into the office today to meet him and to see the new office, and also got a chance to meet his two co-founders. I have the greatest respect for both of these individuals, but I had not met them before. So just moments ago, I had the chance to meet Evan Frank, who many people in the travel industry know from his very successful startups, both Context Travel and Just Fine Stay. And I also got a chance to meet Henley Vasquez as well, who is the founder of Passported. And very interesting, as you'll hear in this conversation. Jake, Henley, and Evan all graduated university right at the same time. They're literally right around the same age. And they have built this company over the last four and a half years. And for anyone who is not familiar, they are one of the most exciting success stories in the travel industry today. They are known as the Modern Travel Agency, which is exactly what you see as you walk into the office. And they have grown at an incredible pace over the last four and a half years. They have just recently raised more than 60 million in their Series C, and that's based on doing 1.5 billion in gross sales in 2025. Just extraordinary. So we'll talk about that in this episode. And they now support more than 11,000 fora travel advisors around the world. And here we are in New York City. Their office is right near the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, right in downtown New York, across from City Hall. You can see a beautiful view from here, looking over the park at City Hall at 225 Broadway. And I also had the chance to see a couple of familiar faces when I came in to the office today. Stephanie and Shana from Legends. They are truly legends of our Travel Trends podcast. They have been on the show multiple times. Both of them have kindly participated in our AI summit over the last two years. Their company that I've highlighted many times on our show as being at the forefront of AI and travel, especially with their work around personalization, taking data from first your images on your phone, but then also your calendar and creating a traveler DNA profile. Well, one of the big exciting developments after that series C raise is that Fora acquired Legends, and Stephanie and Shayna are now part of the team working closely with Jake. So it's wonderful
to see good friends and industry colleagues here and also to see the space because they've now expanded to a second floor as they continue to hire and recruit fantastic talent to be a part of this journey. And Jake and I are going to discuss a lot of exciting things today. One of them, of course, is going to be AI because Jake has been a part of our AI Summit as well. Foro was kindly a sponsor of last year's event, and they are very much at the forefront with how technology is changing travel and trying to understand the real and practical role of AI and what the future looks like for travel advisors and ultimately why humans and hospitality still sit at the center of it all. I know Matthew Upchurch is also a huge fan of Fora. I have many colleagues that are fora advisors, and I'll talk about that a little bit on this episode as well. And so many companies I've had the privilege to work with over the years that are part of the fora supplier and partner network. So if you are curious about becoming a travel advisor, if you're an investor looking to understand where this industry is headed, if you're a potential partner on the hotel, cruise, tours, or even experiences side, this episode is for you. And for those of you that are skilled engineers with a background in computer science, looking for the next great career opportunity, then there's lots of great discussion in here for you as well. You can learn more at foratravel.com, and I highly recommend you checking out the website as we're having this conversation. But let me welcome my good friend Jake Peters back to the Travel Trends Podcast. Thank you so much, Jake, for inviting me to be here in New York. It's great to see you again. Really looking forward to having you back on the show.
SPEAKER_01Thanks, Dan. It's great to have you here. We're uh in lower Manhattan and on Broadway, right near City Hall and the Oculus, uh, for as HQ, which is now a two-story, a two-floor uh office space with an internal staircase. So I feel like we've hit the big time. Um we're on the edge of uh, you know, some real winter weather here in January, but the uh the team is um you know busy keeping it warm with all of our energy uh releasing stuff and using AI, you know, somewhere.
SPEAKER_04Well, there's so much for us to talk about in our conversation today because there's been a huge development to the for in 2025. Clearly, you guys have been going from strength to strength. You've obviously had the major uh fundraising round, but obviously that's based on the growth of the business. And coming into the office today, I was delighted to see the rest of the team and have a chance to meet uh Evan and Henley, and then also to see the team from Legends, uh Stephanie and Shana, who've obviously been on our podcast as well. And I know they've come into the business. We'll talk about that as well, given some of the acquisitions you've done and the focus on AI and personalization. But I want to make sure that everyone understands fora and your role because you know, we are great friends and colleagues. We see each other at conferences all the time, even if it's occasionally in passing and you're waving to me while I'm recording. Um, so it's nice to finally have this time, dedicated time to be able to sit down together and record. But for anyone who doesn't know about fora travel and is just getting to know you too, Jake, would you mind giving some everyone a bit of an overview of fora and the company and your role?
SPEAKER_01Sure. Um, so fora, we started um in 2021. In some sense, we're a host agency. Um, you know, in many ways, we're slightly different. Uh our goal is to create a platform that um allows travel entrepreneurs to build their own businesses as travel advisors. So there's a there's a lot, obviously, to that. Um, you know, we we think about it in this uh this framework that Evan penned um in his essay in 2021 when we got started, the better equation in travel, which combines advisors, clients, and suppliers to create this like really great outcome for people looking to travel. Um so we we sort of we we we think about our you know, like customers in in each of those corners of this triangle. The advisors, you know, build their businesses on our platform. They serve clients, but we also have some work to make sure that clients have a great experience. And then we're also a distribution platform for our supplier partners, hotels, cruises, activities, transportation, et cetera, et cetera. Um, and so we serve all of these corners of this triangle to create these amazing outcomes.
SPEAKER_04Well, tell us a little bit about the team that came together to create for because there's three founders. And obviously, I just mentioned Evan and Henley and yourself. You and I have obviously gotten to know each other extremely well. And I have a great respect for your background and technical expertise. So it's great to have you know the CTO and co-founder to have this discussion since this company is very much a technology company and focused on engineering and seeing the space today, yeah, the fact you've expanded to two floors. You've got two incredible floors here in New York City, uh, seeing the office environment, the culture, the buzz around the place, and it's very clear that you guys are building something really special here. But tell us a little bit about the co-founders and how this business got started.
SPEAKER_01Um Evan and I met in 2009 in London at a on Sunday night at a Thanksgiving dinner at his apartment. Um we were both living in London, and uh this was like the fourth Thanksgiving dinner of that weekend. We actually have a photo in which you could see the back of my head from his living room. Um, and then we both moved back to Lower Manhattan. Actually, I lived just around the corner from here, and he did as well in 2011, 2012. And we used to meet up and have breakfast at diners like in the neighborhood that are now no longer in existence as the New York diner culture culture has kind of faded. And we would, you know, just meet and kind of support each other as founders of other startups. Um he was in travel at the time uh and he moved to the U.S. to uh build One Fine Stays U.S. business and eventually take over um as the CEO of that business uh before it's sold to a core. So I knew uh we spent a lot of time together in that era, and I was building PayParks, a fintech company here in New York. And you know, it's like as founders, you sort of deal with stuff that's you know just unique to the founder world, like people problems and organizational structure issues and investor relations. And it's really hard for someone who's not a founder to sort of understand that. So we built this, you know, deep understanding. And Evan and I are very different people in some ways. Um, and so that actually makes our relationship even better because we approach things from a slightly different perspective. So it's like, you know, one plus one equals three in that regard. Meanwhile, Evan met Henley because their kids um uh one of their each one of their kids, or each one has a kid that was in the same class at the public school in Tribeca, and they were the only two parents in travel. And so they, you know, met each other and then Evan was at One Fine Stay, and Henley was a travel advisor. She um had graduated and actually was at Indigari doing content and then built their original bookings team and then left and built her own through a series of things, built her own virtuoso travel agency called Passported and had a few ICs. And she was selling One Fine Stay. And then later, when Evan went to Context, she was selling context tours, uh, which is interesting. So they knew each other both as parents in the classroom um and then also as travel colleagues. And uh Evan and I in 2021 were at the like sort of a change in cycle. You know, he had left context and I had was at the end of this fintech startup journey, both thinking about what was next. And we had not really had a breakfast for a couple years at that point, and we sort of gathered together again and started talking about different ideas, and none of them were in travel. He and Henley were talking about this idea of you know, what is the future of the world of travel advising? Um, you know, from his side on the supplier, from his perspective on the supplier side, travel advisors were a great way to distribute um inventory and they brought great clients. Um Henley had just you know survived COVID with as a travel advisor, it's not wasn't easy and was thinking about like, okay, how do I scale? What's next for me? She had been doing this, you know, for her whole career. Um and so they sort of noodled on this idea for fora, what became fora like why aren't more people travel advisors? Why is this not the most amazing job?
Why are all these people going to become real estate agents and not travel advisors? Um and so Evan wrote this famous like memo, showed it to some investors, and one of them said, Okay, I've I've had this similar idea, here's money. And this doesn't happen very often in the world of you know startups. Like you just it wasn't even an investor deck, it was like a just a 20-page memo, which um I do agree with Evan that writing your ideas down and kind of refining over and over is a really great way to sort of get to a polished idea. So he and I were talking about other things. I was away for a couple weeks, came back, and he's like, I want to tell you about this idea, we'd like you to join me and Henley in doing it, and we already have money. And it turns out that the investor is someone that I went to college with, although I didn't know that it was him at the time. Um and so we're actually one funny thing about us is we're all the exactly the same age, and we all with plus or minus, you know, win the same year, and we all graduated college in 01, and the investor went to college with me in 01. I I've I knew him like both at school and also just by bumping into him in the New York investing scene. This is Brian from Forerunner. And I had not been a part of a kind of situation like this where when you raise money from someone like Forerunner, people just start throwing money at you. So we we closed this seed round very quickly and immediately got to building. Um and so we had Evan, the business person supplier side travel person, Henley the travel advisor and kind of role model, travel advisor number one for the whole thing. Um, and me the not coming from travel, although I have many friends uh that are work in hospitality or like very hospitality adjacent. So I'm not unfamiliar with like hotel operations and hotels and this kind of stuff. And um uh, you know, so me the tech and product guy, and it very quickly I was like the CTO, but really Evan and I had this very early discussion. I remember this on a walk um uh outside of our old Wii work. He's like, I think you're also the CPO. And I was like, Yes, I mean this is kind of the job that I've had. And in 2021, there weren't so many CPTOs. I still think this is kind of like a little bit of a mouthful, but that's effectively what I am. So the whole uh engineering product, product ops, product design, and if maybe some other things, support all sit um, you know, on my team. And it it it's nice. Like we don't really we don't have this like you know product versus engineering culture. The pods are constructed where everyone builds together.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_04And I just want to highlight, too, for all of our listeners, you know, with this four and a half year journey from a very successful startup to the culture that I saw when I walked in the office today having a chance to speak to Evan and Henley. The fact that you guys are actually sit right next to each other. I mean, Evan's got his stand-up desk with his awesome uh um motorized uh yeah, the treadmill is not really there's a new thing, and I'm not sure it's successful.
SPEAKER_01Uh but the the microphone, the stand he doesn't sit.
SPEAKER_03So I yeah.
SPEAKER_04So what I was amazed, like there everyone was right there. You guys are sitting right beside each other. And as soon as I saw you, I got to see Evan and I got to meet Henley. And just the the dynamic between the three of you, the fact that you've been on this journey together, you guys clearly have great chemistry. There's a great company culture that clearly exudes from that dynamic that you guys have had. And and you've been on this, you know, uh incredible journey now and and had a massive 2025. So I just wanted to uh just to highlight when uh I got a chance to know Evan, you you highlighted obviously a successful background with One Fine Stay and Context Travel, and then Henley as well with passported and then yourself, the fact that, you know, with pay perks, you know, your company was acquired. All three of you are very successful entrepreneurs. So you know what it takes to build a successful business. And you know, lightning doesn't strike that often, but it clearly has here with fora, with the three of you coming together, and then just seeing the trajectory from 2025. And that's one of the things I want to talk about because I think a lot of people would have only found out about fora in the last year. And so many people, even with this podcast, are gonna learn more about fora and what you guys do. And it's such an unrealized opportunity. Technology, travel advisors. I mean, many of our listeners know it's my background. Like I started 20 years ago in this industry working at Carlson Wagonly developing tools for travel advisors to be able to use. And even at the time, you said, you know, 01, that whole era of the dot-com, you know, boom and bust and the rise of OTAs, everyone was predicting the demise of travel agents. And in fact, their roles have flourished. And here we are in 2026 talking about this incredible company that has empowering uh travel advisors. So let's let's talk a little bit about 2025. So we fast forward kind of four years from that uh origin story. Let's talk about some of the big highlights from 2025. So what what were some of the big takeaways from last year?
SPEAKER_01Sure. It was um it's uh, you know, every year we do these end-of-year recaps, and I was thinking back to what it was, you know, the end of 2024 and what we were working on. And it was to try and write it my own. Of course, I have this stuff documented, but I wanted to create the list from scratch of all the things we released just to see if I could remember them. And I had to re I had to remember back to these some of the things we we have now in our platform were built really in December. We launched in December of 2024, which was a year ago when we did our December town hall. And I was like, wow, these things are things that I sort of just are now like sort of air part of everyday life, but they're really only a year old. Um we so we built a lot of stuff. We'll get into that. We raised our Series C and we announced it, which was a big deal because we hadn't announced our B from two years ago. So I mean a lot of people knew in sort of the inside investor world, but I don't think like the world knew. Um so that was a big deal. And we could talk about how that came together too, because it really came together because the wife of our lead investor is a fora advisor, which is kind of also like just the perfect story here. Yeah.
SPEAKER_04Can I speak to so many
people who are for advisors that uh have entered the industry? Even uh Shana, who's now obviously joined the team, part of Legends, she was one of the first people that mentioned to me, and um she that she had become a fora advisor as well. And then Propelic, so one of our main sponsors and good friends of the Travel Trends podcast, uh Brendan Bliss, who runs the agency Propelic, he had started as a fora advisor and was booking all of his friends and family travel and cruises. So there is this, but anyone who experiences the platform and starts using it, whether you are a travel advisor or you're gonna be new to the industry, they love the platform and the technology. So it's interesting you make that connection that his wife was a travel advisor looking at uh a fora advisor, saw the potential, and I was like, we need to do more here.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, he uh so this is Kareem from Thrive, um, Kareem Zaki, and and uh we've we've always we've gone through these three or I guess four now fundraising cycles, seed A, B, B, C. And the we've done it before we I mean, we obviously needed our seed money to get started, but the other ones happened a little bit before we needed money, which is the best time to raise money. And so we've approached this in a it's never relaxing, but it's it's like the most relaxing it could be kind of way. It's still not easy, even when it's easy, but to raise money. And uh I just remember this meeting with Kareem. He came down, he he came into the office and it was late. I I remember it being very dark, but um and it wasn't it was like March, so it wasn't that like mid-winter, so it was it must have been late in the day. And Henley was not here, so it was just me and Evan. And the questions weren't you know the same normal questions. They wanted to know the story of like how Evan and I knew each other and how how the whole thing started. And his his wife doesn't I don't I think she maybe now she does, but I think we we didn't notice that she was on our platform. Um and we would have noticed this, and um and so it we're like, how do you know so much about what we're doing? And he was like, Well, my wife is a fore advisor and we're like, Oh, that's that's amazing. So he's like, I've watched you um now, you know, and he's seen my product release notes, he's seen what we're doing, what we're building. Um and it's enabled his wife to build a travel advising business. So he understood the value intrinsically. And I think that makes him you know, that made it easy for him to become a great partner in Thrives obviously uh an amazing um partner to have in from that meeting. Uh our other investors are also fantastic. Um we we're very, very lucky around you know, who we have uh supporting us on our on our cap table, both with Forerunner, Insight, and hardcore, hardcore. Um, and and our board is just we just had a board meeting this week is is really a nice balance. And I think it's like we're three mature founders that sort of knew what we were doing, and so we don't have a lot of drama. And if we do, we sort it out. We're like adults in the room and our board kind of works with us in the same way, um, where we just have these like very honest discussions about what we need to be doing and how we could be doing better. So we we'll talk about all the product stuff we released. We also um you know have uh 11,000 roughly monthly active advisors. We sold a billion over a billion and a half in travel last year, which is kind of crazy. Um and when you when I look at it even on the individual hotel basis, I'm talking about like you know, I'm dealing with like a GDS issue. And I try to when I'm when I'm when there's a problem and we're talking to the salespeople of a particular hotel, I try to you know, weave in like just how much stuff we We've sold of a hotel and you know, there's certain hotels where we're selling like a percent or two of their total room occupancy, which is kind of insane. And um and so that's also interesting to look at when we look at our data. We have last year was also really interesting. We have I I think we're trying to do a lot, like bring new people to the industry, but we're also trying to support our advisors in making themselves more efficient and able to grow their businesses in the way they want. And so a really interesting stat from last year is we have a number of um people up that are selling more than two million in a year who've gotten to this point in like really a year, year and a half, which is like much faster than the traditional person in industry doing that. The our two million dollar producers from 2024 grew their business more than 120% in 2025, year over year, which is crazy. So there used to be this threshold where, you know, and Henley could tell you firsthand running her own agency, getting beyond two million usually means like hiring a team and thinking about ways you can scale yourself. Well, our our tooling and what we've built has enabled these advisors to really push this threshold higher now to 4 million. So we had our first um our our our one of our top advisors, you know, is a $10 million solo advisor, basically, and uses our tools um to run her entire business. Essentially, she has some help, but essentially herself, which is kind of I I don't think this is heard of in the industry. So it's real valid. It's not like we're just saying this stuff is happening, it's real validation with the numbers. And that, you know, we we knew this was there, but it really materialized in 2025.
SPEAKER_04Well, one of the things when you point to the growth that you've had and doing a billion in revenue last year, like that the reality is this industry is 100 billion plus and growing. And this is when we look at the next five to ten years, the aging baby boomer population, you know, half have retired, half are retiring the next five years, this whole generational wealth transfer that is going to happen. But before that happens, all of those baby boomers are traveling as much as possible. They're using travel advisors. Younger generation are also embracing travel advisors much more than ever before, even in the face of all this technology. And one of the things, just to set the stage for all of our listeners, because what intrigued me the most about Fora was recognizing that there was this important problem to solve where you had OTAs that were charging much higher commissions, like 25%. And a lot of these independent travel advisors could do that at half the cost, but with real kind of passion and expertise. And the there is something very special about that human connection, especially when someone's booking a trip that is likely going to be, you know, it's it's there's a lot riding on it beyond the cost. And I think most of our uh audience who are travel advisors know exactly what I'm talking about. When you're speaking to a customer that has saved up for that big holiday, or they are, you know, they they have two weeks off a year, um, like many Americans. And they, you know, that trip is that much more important to make sure it goes well because it's the value of their time, not just the money that they're spending on it. So they want to make sure that they're gonna have an amazing experience and they trust their travel advisor. And I know, you know, being at the Virtuoso conference, uh, Matthew Upchurch is a huge fan of fora and understanding that connection too, because he's the guy that coin the term travel advisor over travel agent because it's very much a profession, not someone that's just an order taker. And in this era of you know, advanced technology and AI, equipping agents with these tools and knowing that they've embraced the platform is one of the big reasons that I wanted to record this spotlight uh together and also be here in New York with you to actually understand the culture of the company, which I know I've highlighted a couple of times, but it's one of the things that when you're solving an important problem like this and building you know fora as the modern travel agency, you're solving a very important problem that was currently very underserved and hampered by outdated systems. And it's so it was very frustrating for a lot of travel agents to work with their existing partners, and it's why a lot of them have gravitated to the fora platform, is because they love actually using the technology. And you're obviously the guy that's behind that is the CTO. Um, so just before we talk about some of the big product updates in 2025, and then obviously you want to get into what the plans are for 2026. And I know our listeners, many of them travel agents, travel advisors that are gonna be keen to understand that. Just give everyone a bit of an overview, uh, Jake, of the platform itself, the type of products that are available to be sold. Let's make sure that for anyone that is potentially going to listen to this and decide to become a fora advisor, tell us a little bit more about the platform, what they can come to expect, and why you're seeing people love it so much.
SPEAKER_01Sure.
You know, I think it's but before I say what we do, it's kind of worth, you know, just saying what you for those who don't know, like what you need to be a travel advisor. You don't really need a platform. You can um just like we started for we were like we had Google Sheets and you know access to a list of our preferred partner hotels, and you could go book all these hotels on their own website using your IATA and like special access codes, and you'd have to like search all of them to find the rates. And you know, you need to we need to, there's a huge financial operation around collecting and you know, uh reconciling and dispersing commissions. Um effectually that's kind of all you need. And then the advisors can sort of manage their own workflow or use like third-party tools that are available to the travel advisor space. So when I looked at this, I said, okay, like I didn't know what I was going to be building. And we said, okay, let's build this portal that people could use to do their work. Okay, what needs to go in the portal? So the first thing was just a secure credit card vault because as a former fintech founder, I'm looking around and I'm seeing credit card numbers on post-it notes and you know in emails, and I'm like, okay, this is not good. So we fixed that. And then we it was immediately clear that we needed to build a booking platform. And so we build that. Now that's now two over two years old. Um uh two weeks ago, or was it last week? One of the last two weeks, we booked 17 million dollars in the week through our booking platform. It's kind of cool. Um, you know, which is a huge uptick from you know what we were doing on a weekly basis last year. So that's kind of fun. Um we have a long road. We'll talk about like what we're gonna do with that next year. That's just hotel, by the way. Uh then um we we need a training. Um, so we have this like world-class training program with I think nearly a thousand lessons um in our portal that combines training on you know how to be a travel advisor, like what is this from you know, you know day zero of this journey, if you're new to the industry, all the way to advanced topics like how to deal with tricky client situations, how to sell crews, how to sell how to work with DMCs to destination trainings, to supplier trainings. So we have all this stuff in our library. Um and this year, uh this in 2025, I think one of the big things that we did was we launched our first um advisor enablement workflow tooling that connects advisors to clients. So our itinerary builder, our proposal builder. And our vision for the platform is really to be this one stop shop where you can manage your entire business all in one together. And a lot of other people in the industry, this is not like you know, a unique idea. People are also talking about this at other places, like how to reduce the busy work of copying and pasting. But um you we're an agency, so we have all of this end-to-end from the workflow tooling to the booking to the commission reconciliation to the actual payouts to the training to like everything you need to manage your business. And we host it. So we're sort of like this service layer. Um, you want to be an advisor. I can't think of a better place to be. I mean, obviously I'm biased. And I have a lot of respect for many of the other host agencies out there that are doing great things. And in some cases, they do specific things that are better than us. But from a technology perspective, if you want to book a hotel um and make an itinerary for your client, uh, this is, I mean, I've seen a lot of the tooling. This is, you know, one of the best, if not the best, tools. Um, and it's gonna get a lot better. So we we really pride ourselves in making our advisors efficient um and make them, you know, real travel entrepreneurs and the tools that they would expect in the years 2025 and 2026. So we're not talking about what was possible in 2015 or 2001. It's like what would you expect today? And in many cases, that means we can we we we bump into uh legacy issues, like to put it nicely, like um 2025. One of my main problems from 2025 is battling the GDS, which you know, we dump a lot on the GDS. It's not necessarily only their fault. It they also connect to hotel systems, which are equally bad. And so it's really like the infrastructure of hotels and is kind of insane. And you would never tolerate this kind of insur infrastructure in any other industry, like the banking industry. Like, you know, if you said to someone, okay, I don't know what percentage of your bank account transactions might be like slightly wrong, you know, the answer would be it should be zero, right? Well, in travel, it's like what percentage of your hotel bookings should be slightly wrong. It's like, it's not zero. Uh, you know, I don't actually know what percentage of is, but as it as we've grown and we book a lot, it feels like every day we're creating, you know, it's like a more money, more problems. It's like a more booking, more booking ops problems problem. And so we I knew it was going to be bad, but I as we've scaled, it's like almost unbearable how many problems we have. And it's really embarrassing because it creates financial problems for our hotels and it erodes traveler and their advisor trust. And it's like we're just like, okay, but it's it's not our fault. It's this hotel's fault that published an incorrect rate or didn't have the room type right. Or you know, we've had crazy stuff like one hotel, which I won't mention, who like marketed a room as 850 square feet in their own GDS description of the room, and they had the traveler measured it and it was 650 square feet, and they requested a discount. And the hotel was like, you need to change your booking platform to not say it's an 850 square foot room. And I'm like, uh, that description is from your GDS, you know, your uh your your channel manager, you need to fix it. Um so just this like lack of understanding, even for the people who work in the industry about how their own technology works, is was is like you know, mind-boggling to me to some extent. So we're we're trying to work with our partners to make this whole thing more seamless because ultimately we need, you know, our goal from a distribution perspective is to leverage the scale, to be at the scale of an OTA to make things easy to buy and sell, I guess depending on which way you're looking at it, um, but with the high-quality clients um and well-matched travelers to products that come from the travel advisor space.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. And the product, uh, this is one thing I want to highlight to all of our listeners as well, because when Jake and I first connected, we were talking about the hotels because you were building it up on the hotels and cruises, and you're only getting into experiences at that point. And then now you have for a reserve. So like the product portfolio has evolved quite substantially. And I just wanted to underscore the point that Jake was just sharing, which and I also hear today from a lot of investors that are focused on investing in the plumbing of travel as they like to refer to it, because all of that back integration, when Jake talks about the GDS, global distribution systems, for many of us that are working
the industry, obviously those terms are so familiar to us, and even understanding the background of airlines partnering together to make sure that all of their fares were available to be able to booked on systems that pre-existed the internet. This is, you know, so you you have that whole uh and then as soon as the internet became available, a lot of these companies started developing APIs, application interfaces to make their product available if there wasn't on the GDS. So now you have to pair product. And I still remember this from my very first role in travel with trying to figure out how we connect car, uh hotel, and air. And where does it start? It starts with the GDS and air, and then we have to get inventory from hotels, and then we have to get car reservations. Something that seems incredibly simple to a user trying to book those three things together is incredibly complex in the back end. And the part I wanted to highlight is all of these partners that you now have, because you've got the infrastructure in place, you know, building off hotels and crews, even like because a big focus for me certainly has been the tour operator side. We certainly have a lot of tour operators that listen to our podcasts, you know, G Adventures, Intrepid, those are on your platform now. And, you know, even companies like Tauc, like you guys have done a lot of integration. Um, and when I think about Tauc, like they're working with companies like Captio and like their systems, like each of these companies are trying to improve their technology so they can better work with a company like uh Forra. And then the one other thing that I'm keen to ask you about this, even Fora Reserve, the fact that you're now partnering, you've got like 6,000 hotels around the world. You know, have the Red Carnation Collection, which is part of my background, the travel corporation. Jonathan is a great friend of mine, the CEO of Red Carnation. We're doing a series in season seven on luxury hotels. Um, and he's gonna co-host that with me. And so the fact that you guys have moved into that premium space as well for your clients. So tell us a little bit from a product point of view, where you guys are on this journey now.
SPEAKER_01Well, I think um, yeah, I mean, there's many things to talk about there. So one, we've only we haven't integrated, just to start from the beginning of what you said, we haven't integrated with people like TAC. I mean, I really like the tour operators like Tauc, backroads, um, you know, uh National Geographic, like land tours, um, you know, people like tour radar. There's a lot of stuff there. And there's no sort of common protocol to do these integrations. So it it gets complicated. And we haven't actually done that. So I I do think it's probably not this year, but for tours like those multi-day tour kind of things. But next year, I would love to be able to have multi-day tour inventory in our platform. So even this year, I I hope we'll get to the point, you know, we're talking to the just sort of activities, like the day tour stuff, like you know, via get your guide project expedition, like these kinds of things. We'll have these in our platform. We don't yet to be fully transparent. We sell a lot of insurance, it's not integrated in. I would love to our insurance partners would love it. I want to do it. Um then then I just comment there to is that other third-party platforms for advisors are doing those things and charging, marking them up and and you know, because they need to make money. We're a host agency, so when we do that, we won't mark those things up and they'll just be available as they are at price naturally priced, which is one of the advantages that we have. We we don't have a cruise tool yet because you know, when I started Fora, like half the things I looked at are no longer in existence. There's been an incredible amount of turnover in the cruise tool space, but we are launching, um I've seen it, it exists, um, a cruise booking platform for Fora advisors. It's not gonna be ours, we're going to skin it um someone else's and do single sign-on. It's gonna be really easy to use and integrate back with our data and everything. So it's gonna be amazing. Because just like with hotels, like you, you, if you want to know, okay, I want to maybe go to you know, the uh Croatia, I want to go something around Croatia and I want to see all the cruises that stop and split into Brovnik sometime next October. You we currently can't do that in our infrastructure and understand where there are perks and which sailings and is filtered by different kinds of levels of luxury and price. And so being able to do that is gonna be really important, especially as we're looking to grow, you know, your earlier comment about more people boomers, especially. It's like that my parents like crews because they don't have to pack and unpack. So there's definitely a an an audience for crews that's gonna be emerging. Um we've we're I I don't know if this well we're I mean, we sell a lot of Virgin Voyages. I think it's known, or maybe they've said, but we're their top agency. Like we we that has been a great example of something new to the market where we're able to take this, sort of develop this new audience of people that are now cruising for the first time and and selling a ton of cruise. So we have a we have a whole cruise desk. Um, we do training for advisors, we teach you how to sell crews. If you have a client that um you want to uh like you know, that you you're not a cruise advisor and you haven't gone through all the training and you just the client wants to go on a cruise. We have a way through our delegation tool where you can actually the cruise desk can go into your portal and help you service that client on your behalf. The commission split is slightly different. That's all. This is a it's really cool. So this is what we're able to do. We launched a group, we have a huge groups business that's emerging. Um and so we have someone, Julie, who leads our groups team, um, or and so we we do a lot of training for groups for advisors. This has been kind of the craftiness of our our travel entrepreneurs. They've just developed these groups businesses, whether it's you know, stuff you'd expect like a wedding block or um like a corporate, small corporate group, but people have, you know, done amazing things like uh book clubs that are taking 300 nights on a cruise, uh 300 rooms uh cabins on a cruise or um affinity travel or all sorts of things. And so that's gonna be a big area of focus for us, how we scale groups. We're also launching, we have a flights desk. Um, and uh that the way we sort of backed into that was kind of interesting. And we're launching um, you know, it's it's over email. So I remember Carlson Wagon Leap because when I was a consultant, I'd have to like email in for my flights. This is email is not a great way to book flights. So we have a flight booking tool that's launching in uh integrated into our flight desk this year. It's gonna be ready very, very soon. Um probably everyone at Fora will have it sometime late March, April, depending on how we sort of roll this out. Um and then transfers and all this, all this other stuff. So we'll have full connected trip booking um, you know, across all categories. I don't know if it'll be everything by the end of this year, but definitely in early next year we'll we'll have this. It's gonna be super exciting. And then we have a lot to do on on um on hotel too. But like just to sort of put this in perspective, because you talk about tooling and what you need. So if you're a traditional agency, you need to go collect all these commissions. So a lot of what we've built for the first couple of years was this, you know, it's like an iceberg, like under the water line, there's this ginormous operation that's collecting and dispersing commissions. And one of the things we realized is that modern agencies aren't very good at paying their advisors. And so they settle for this like, you know, eventual payout percentage of 90% or 95% of commissions that are owed to an advisor. And we thought that that's ridiculous. And so we're we're we're our goal is you know somewhere way above 99% and fast. So you can't grow up, you you wouldn't be expected to do work and get paid 90 days later. This is kind of ridiculous, like maybe or not at all.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And so we've built this infrastructure to pay people. I don't remember the exact stat, but most of our commissions are paid 30 to 45 days after checkout, which is really quite fast. Um, to reconcile
and adjust all that um takes a lot of effort. So we built that all ourselves. Um the thing is you need to know the booking in order to collect the commissions. And so we used to manually log all this stuff. So we built an AI logger this past year. So you just send your you can upload a PDF of your booking or you can email it in. And we have an AI tool that parses it all and figures out exactly what you booked, and you go through this really nice interface and you just verify it or adjust it slightly. And this gives us um, you know, a tremendous amount of booking information. And then this thing we launched with this integrated itinerary builder, that booking is immediately available on your trip. And you can press a button and turn that booking or set of bookings inside of a trip to a client-facing itinerary with your advisor branding on it, send them the link. You could do this in like minutes. And so that and not that the itinerary builder isn't fully available on every mobile on a mobile device yet, but you can we're working on that, but if you can do most of that on your phone.
SPEAKER_04Well, that's one of the things I specifically wanted to ask you about was bookable quotes, because I know that was a big launch for you guys last year. And for any travel advisor that is working with a client, they're trying to put these packages together. And it's very different than just an online booking experience where someone's trying to book their own flight and then book their own hotel. I mean, this is the the the beauty of working with a travel advisor is they're gonna put together a custom quote, and it has to be exactly that. It has to be a quote because the uh customer needs to still make the ultimate decision that these are all the things they want to do, and these are the right flights for them, this is the right tour, or this is the right cruise and transfers, and there's there's a lot of complexity that a travel advisor takes away to just give the consumer the flexibility of choice and making sure that all of that work. Is what they handle. And so when they've put together a quote, they've put a lot of time and effort into this and they get the final confirmation from the customer. And then now it's time to actually make that. And so make that booking come to life. And some of it is trying to hold reservations. That's another aspect of all of this, is that you can't have it be that all of a sudden that quote's not valid anymore. So there's all these other factors about how long you can hold something for. But tell us a little bit more about those the bookable quotes. Because they think tell us how that rolled out and what the response has been to that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, the uh it's really kind of phenomenal. So um 17% of our volume that we did last week in our booking platform was done via bookable quote just to sort of end it. So that's it. I mean, you might think that's low, but actually I think that's quite high. Um so just what bookable quote is. So instead of um preparing, like if you want to book a hotel, if you're saying, okay, Dan, you want to go to Paris, I'll figure out some options and I have my set of favorite hotels, I want to quote you, and I get your price range, and I'm gonna say, okay, here's some rooms at La Fantasy that's in this area, here's like the Kimton, you know, that's in another area, and here's something on on the other side of the river. Um maybe at a slightly higher or lower price point or whatever. Um and with each of those hotels, I might say, you know, here's the basic room, but if you want, like here's why I would suggest spending a little bit more money. Um, and then usually these are four reserve partners or something like this. So there's an upgrade. And so if you, you know, you're if you're starting at the elevated non-suite room, you know, maybe the upgrade gets you to the suite or something like that. So um, and I can outline all this in a nice email to you with like static pricing. So then you go home and you're busy, you're traveling, you wait two days, three days, you sit with your partner, you know, it's like me and my wife, we're talking about stuff at like 11 p.m. in bed, like after the kids go to sleep, and it's quiet. We can like actually make decisions. We're like looking at where we're gonna be doing, like what we're doing tomorrow. This is the only time, right? Know that well. I know that very well. I book for clients, and they, you know, they're mostly my friends, and so like they're texting me and stuff, like but normal advisor-client relationships, you're not texting your advisor at 11 p.m. going, like, we'll take this room, you know, and they're writing back, like, cool, I'll do it. You know, and um why not just book it right there when you're looking at that information? Also, like formatting that email to send to your clients is so annoying. So um we said there's gotta be a better way. So we built this thing. So you create this quote, it has all the feedback you want or kind of merchandising you want in it, plus the live bookable rate. So this solves a few problems. One, if if time passes from when you look at it, from when I sent it to you, it's pulling, it's showing both the price at which I added it and the current price. So the price at which I added it is important because let's say something moves from $500 to $900 and you go, okay, Jake is insane. He thinks I'm gonna spend that much money on this room. Like, and it'll at least show you, okay, when I added it, it was $500. And then maybe it went down too. It could have been cheaper. Or if it's sold out, it's not available anymore. That's also easy. The thing is, maybe it's $20 more. So if if you if I send you a static quote, maybe it's $50 more in a $500 room. If I sent you a static quote and then you wrote me back three days later, Jake, I'll take it. I go look it up again and I go, oh, it's $50 more. I have to, I'm not just gonna book him, book it because I need to confirm that he's okay with it being $50 more. So I write you back, another day passes, now the room is sold out. This is ridiculous. Like this happens all the time to advisors. So we're like, let's just, this is not how modern commerce should happen. So we built this tool. You can just go click, check out. The other thing that's happened, and advisors have reported that they've gotten better about thinking about how they merchandise the options to their clients, which is really like back to my early consulting days. You know, like present three options to the client and you want them to take the middle option and make the first and third option so in whatever whatever, like that they're going to just take the second option because it's like the, you know, it's anchoring. So, you know, a uh, I don't know, like a $60,000 looks cheap amongst a sea of $100,000 cars, right? Like it it it it's um it when when that, you know, previously we might have thought that was expensive. So what advisors are reporting is that they're often showing clients, um, you know, I know you asked for the king room at this hotel, but I just want to show you that for a hundred dollars more a night, you could have the junior suite. Just look at it. And actually, there's another hotel around the corner that's even better. And what advisors are reporting is that people are uh just upselling on their own, like like they're picking a higher category. And that would have not been something they might have done with like a standard quote. So that's really interesting. An advisor, two funny stories. An advisor just wrote me yesterday that they sent a bookable quote um two months ago to a client for some to travel later this year, and they were just notified uh today or yesterday that the person booked. They've forgotten about it. And two, the tool is so easy to use. We launched this at our live forum, which is our massive like uh own event that we do every fall for our own advisory community. I'm on stage doing what's kind of like the most fun thing I do all year, which is kind of be get to be Oprah and give away um, you know, like free technology to our advisors. It's it's really like it's really fun. And so this was in the segment of you know, you everyone gets a bookable quote tool um describing the tool. And we had just turned it on at the beginning of the session for everyone. And this advisor in like the third row just kind of like instinctually just like kind of jumped up and raised her hand and in the middle of my sentence, and I'm like, what's going on? Do you want to say something? And she's like, I just sent a bookable quote five minutes ago, and the person just booked it.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And I was like, Yes, this is exactly the point. And so it's about making this a much more modern experience. Um and I think there's a, you know, and then we launched a V1 of it, and we have a ton of features and people have great ideas. And so this is this kind of highlights the fun part of it is we can plant a seed and then we sit here and go, okay, we have our own ideas for the next 17 versions of this, but our community starts using it. And our community is full of people that are entrepreneurial, they might be in, they have other jobs, like we have product engineers, product designers, we have tech people, we have marketers, we have you name there's lawyers, accountants in our advisor community. So they're they're giving us really interesting feedback, like, hey, what if you could do this and what if you could do that? And we're going, that's a great idea. We didn't think about it that way. And so we're very attuned to listening to this feedback. And what I told advisors at this beginning of my talk this year at Live Forum was that yes, it's like me and the product vision. I'm supported by 80 plus people on my team. And then my team is supported by the entire company that works with advisors, but really we're also supported by this like 11,000, you know, active advisor community that kind of is co-creating this with us. And that's really powerful from a product perspective because we're able to like build exactly the things that people need to scale their businesses in a way that I don't think exists um in any other place and makes this like a really fun place to be a be someone on my team.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. Well, it's clear when investors look at your business as a huge market opportunity and they look at the team, the founding team, and you know, you guys getting your uh series C and just what the potential is of the business long term. It's still
uh from my vantage point, I'm sure your investors are like you it's still relatively early days. And I want to um underline where you guys have gotten to at the end of 2025 going into 2026. But one of the things that you know, having this conversation with you, Jake, stands out to me is the fact that you came into this industry, and I obviously I knew this from you know getting to know each other, but when you came into this industry, you weren't in travel as you highlighted. You just referred going back to your consulting days. And it's a there's a really an interesting way to innovate in travel. And part of it is people who understand the industry. So clearly both uh Henley and Evan do. They've worked in travel for many years, and Evan, with his successful track record of a couple of like significant exits, and he's developed some innovative products before and he knows the industry really well, and clearly Henley does. But when you you have people that work within the industry that think within the industry, it's not often where the innovation comes from. I know so many organizations that struggle with technology, and I've worked inside some of those organizations. And when they build out new product features, they end up just recreating the wheel again. And it's actually one of the reasons that they struggle is because they rely on the internal team members to help them spec out that new product and they just keep rebuilding what they've already built. You have come in, looked at some of these friction points and addressed some of these challenges, which, you know, as you've just been highlighting, it's a if anything, to me, your mind works in a way that you're very keen to solve these problems because you're coming up against these different friction points and realizing, wait a second, this there is a better way. And this bookable quote was obviously uh one great example of that that you guys delivered last year. But tell us where you guys have gotten to uh in terms of scale and obviously the momentum going into 2026. You mentioned you have 11,000 advisors, you did over a billion dollars in revenue, which is Yeah, billion and a half. Billion and a half, okay. Don't forget that half. That's 500 million and I forget about that.
SPEAKER_00It's like that that's that's you know, more than the whole, you know.
SPEAKER_04And that's in that was in 2025 total bookings, 1.5 billion.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. Okay, all right. And I'm sure there's forward bookings for 2026 that was.
SPEAKER_03Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_01But so we it's interesting in travel because and I think this scares away some investors, you know, because the revenue is really delayed. And this is this just highlights the point, the problem of becoming an advisor. So onboarding to become an advisor, if you're like if you go to another agency that's like that's demanding you be a full-time advisor, they're basically self-selecting who can do that. Who can who can stop work, take it, take basically no pay, and start hustling to sell travel under some sort of like, you know, uh uh like apprenticeship model where you may not be getting a great commission split or something and you're all your revenue is like, you know, year uh months away. No one can do this. Or people who can do that have the financial support that can do it, and it just creates a kind of like, you know, homogeneous industry. So we've said we have many advisors who start out kind of, it's I you know, I'm I'm doing this with my hands, like you know, imagine a graph where like one line is going down and the other line's going up. And at some point, you know, they're ramping down from something. So they're like, they're nearing the end of their teaching career, you know, like accounting career, lawyer career, whatever. And they or they have five other jobs and they want to add something to their portfolio, like they're a you know, photographer, yoga instructor, whatever with a huge network and they want to add travel, or they're um a wedding planner. And actually, like, why isn't the wedding planner also providing like hotel blocks and like honeymoon services and stuff like that? So you you look at all these, it's like, you know, there was a there was like a I don't know if you remember, it's like Coke Zero or something ad where it was like, you know, it was all about the and it's not it's not the or it's like you know, um tastes great and like doesn't have sugar. It it's like this, it's like why why does it have to be or? Like it can be and and so it can be you're a you're a florist and a travel advisor. Like who cares? Like what what is the issue? And you know, I think many of the traditional travel advisors that I knew growing up, which includes like my great aunt, actually, who had a travel, like in-person brick and mortar travel advisor place in uh West Hartford, uh, Connecticut, and my neighbor outside of Boston, who um went to a uh like is still a travel advisor and used to go into an office. They wouldn't go every day, they were three days a week in the office. And so being able to onboard people um into this industry is sort of what we're doing. And I think the momentum is that more and more people are coming to us and saying, I had a three-year plan to transition from my full-time job to being a travel advisor, and I did it in a year, and I'm I want to let you know. They they write us these notes that Henley, Evan, and I, and they're like, Well, I'm so grateful that this has happened faster. And I it we're just like, it's I mean, I'm happy that we're able to support that, but it's like it almost brings like a tear to my eye of joy like that people are able to do this. And it feels so empowering. I mean, so my last fintech job, my startup, empowered low-income people to have financial health. And I was worried that leaving this startup that had so much positive, we helped millions of people save money and improve their financial help through with partners like MasterCard and the US government at the time. And it was really, really amazing. Um and I was a little bit worried coming into this that I wouldn't find the same sort of like meaning. And actually I found it here because that, you know, it's like, how many amon room nights, you know, like are you selling? Like, is this really like changing the world? And actually, we are changing the world. We hear these stories of people who have like tricky parent situations and they needed to stay home to raise their kids, but they didn't want to be, they had like, you know, some hours in the day and they wanted to do something. And it's like, how do you become a travel advisor? And and and we've enabled that. Um and it's it's really just amazing. So a couple of things about scale. We the one thing that when people ask, what's the thing that you didn't expect at the beginning, it's this thing. We have advisors in 92 countries. I did not, we honestly did not expect that. Um, it's kind of amazing. Uh, so we have people all over the world selling travel, and I think part of it has to do with the fact that they don't have local agencies to support them in those places. A lot of those people are sort of somehow like tied to America. That was like the beginning sort of international expansion, but many of them are now like just fully international people. We launched last year. I did not think we were gonna do this. We launched for a Canada and forum Mexico as actual, like uh, you know, registered
agencies in those countries. Um, one surprise last year was the joy of dealing with the Mexican tax authorities. Um, I think actually the IRS could probably take a little bit of an example from from them um in terms of their seriousness around how they do things. So we've had to, you know, just scramble to implement different kinds of ways of thinking about tax accounting there. Independent contractors in Mexico, you have to do withholding, actually. It's so we were not ready for that really, but we had to get ready very quickly. So full credit to the finance pod. I mean, we are it's funny because when I didn't know what I wanted to do next in my startup career. And when we started, one of the things that at first when Evan told me about this idea, I thought he was completely joking. But then I very quickly realized that this is the perfect thing because as a sort of I have a little bit of ADD or a lot of it, I guess. And um, you know, I didn't I didn't want to build just one thing. I wanted to build so many things. So we one of the things we built is we're a comp we're a ginormous fintech company. And um so figuring out how to pay people in 92 countries is is is a challenge. Um and we actually uh we we didn't really expect to have that problem, and we didn't expect to be dealing with like international tax regimes either. And so credit to our finance pod, the product pod that builds all of our financial infrastructure for being able so nimble and being able to do this really quickly. Um we have a lot more of that work ahead for us because we're going to be launching other official countries this later this year. And it's like, you know, no one wakes up in the morning and goes, like, I want to build tech to like, you know, deal with international tax rules. But you got to do it. And um it's really exciting to see the growth there. So that's one thing. Um and, you know, I think you know, next year, when we look when when we talk to our partners, we're planning on doubling this year in terms of our volume and our our momentum is really on pace to do that, or more than that, based on what we're seeing so far as the year has begun. And it's sort of reframed how we're thinking about it. Like Evan is a real big um data person and put together a plan. So our you you mentioned this number before. Our plan really in like 10 years is to sell $100 billion of travel. And the founders, we're when I say this, it's like no one here is looking for another job. Like we all want this to be the last job that we do. And that's not because I want to flip this startup for you know to Google for billions of dollars and like retire. I want to be doing this job, and so does Evan and Henley forever for the rest of our lives. Like it's really a lot of fun. Um, maybe a little bit less work uh in the evenings would be nice. But um, especially you got a young family.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Uh yeah, like just maybe not some manic days, but a little bit of slack or I could actually travel a little bit more. But but I I we all mean this like seriously, that we want to be doing this and build the next generational travel company. Um, I don't know what the future is gonna hold in terms of what format will be. Will we be a public company? We're not thinking about that. Like we're just thinking about okay, what are the next three years sort of? And are they gonna be on track towards this larger vision? But no one is sitting here going like, I want another job or anything like that. So and I think travel is the market that allows you to do that because it is so big and everyone travels. Uh, and it's you know, we'll talk about this when I our views on AI and how I think humans fit into that. But you know, travel is one of these foundational things like food that we just sort of talk about in society on a regular basis when COVID ended, everyone's traveling again. So we we are in this position of being an agent to that, and so we sell everything. So, like if there's a problem in one place, we sell other places. If there's a shifting in economics, you know, we are sitting at the top of the market, which sort of seems to have unlimited demand for travel. Um but if people want to save a little bit of money, they go for a day less or they stay at you know a slightly cheaper hotel, but they're still traveling. Um and so we're not unless I don't I don't think there's gonna be another like global travel disruption, like a COVID kind of thing. I mean, I hope not, or a war. I mean, I don't really know what people the pol I'm uh I don't want to get into like the political situation, but we do look at this very closely. Um, you know, but I think travel is quite resilient. And so we're sitting here looking at like a big roadmap for what we're gonna be doing. And that allows us to think when we're building features back to the technology, we're not I I am building like as fast as possible for tomorrow, but we're doing it in a brick-by-brick way for the longer term. And I think this is where you know, you mentioned like me being new to travel. Um all of my jobs I've been new to it. So I was not a fintech entrepreneur in 2010 when I started Paybergs. And, you know, I was doing things then like integrating to payment platforms that now in 2016 you can do in like 10 minutes, but or in 2016 you could do in 10 minutes when all this new wave of fintech came out. But in 2010, it was like, okay, we're gonna send uh XML files back and forth via SFTP. Well, I I knew how to do that. Um I built this like an uh amazing um data-driven kind of analytics supply chain optimization tool in 2002. We had like nine Pentiums strung together doing linear optimization to help craft save money on their like folding carton spend in ways that they couldn't even believe were possible from an analytics perspective. It wasn't my idea again. I was just doing a lot of the tech at that at that consulting firm. And later we were doing all this multi- multi-channel e-commerce stuff in 2005 and six and seven at when I was at Infosys for clients like Walgreens and their photo department and Victoria's Secret Direct that were on the cutting edge then. And so and then I joined this air taxi startup in the UK. I knew nothing about avi I mean, I knew a lot about aviation, but I didn't know about like aviation systems like flight planning and safety systems and and I pieced together this whole infrastructure for this, you know, seven-plane 40 pilot little airline that we built in the UK. So coming in from the outside is what I've always done. Um and I really like doing that. And I think if I could say like the one thing that's my special skill is like seeing how the bricks get put together to build, you know, whatever your analogy is, like the house um or the skyscraper brick by brick and kind of how you what's the best way to sequence those things out so you have usable product along the way and you're optimizing both for the short term and the long term.
SPEAKER_04Well, given that everyone now has a solid understanding of the foundation at Fora and the solid foundation that the team has built and your role, uh I want to talk about 2026 and where you go from here because you know, you have this incredible momentum. More and more people are recognizing the Fora travel brand. As you highlighted too, uh Jake, one of the things that stood out to me, and the reason I was very keen to record this podcast here together live in person was to meet the team and see the dynamic in the office. And actually, not only the, you know, the uh it's very clear that you guys are all very purpose-driven, but that what you just described was like doing good in the world. I mean, most of these travel advisors, and like you know, many of our listeners know I was raised by a single mom and actually giving them opportunities because many of them are uh it was a has been a female-dominated profession because it was an opportunity for women when they didn't have other uh opportunities and could work from home, especially with young kids. And that is, you know, and it's uh it's lifting up single moms who now can take their kids to school and have the lifestyle that they are seeking. And it's it's very real and meaningful for me to hear you say that and know you mean it and see the dynamic here in the office. And I'm sure many of our listeners will will feel the same way and it will resonate with them. And that's that's that's for me, you know, knowing you have those good intentions and you've built the foundation of this company, understanding where you guys are headed in 2026. And we've already been kind of alluding to some of the exciting developments in terms of product, but what would be, Jay, kind of like if you, you know, given you're even thinking, you know, long term, um, but in 2026, what would be two or three of your kind of main priorities for this year? What are you guys really focusing on building out? Or, you know, what are the real uh top business priorities for you guys here?
SPEAKER_01Yep. Um so it's it's easy. So because we focus it down to really one thing, which is making our advisors more successful. So this is this is our like you know, core essence. Um we also need we want to continue making it this job available to more people. So we will grow our advisor community. Um there's there's just uh we're we're so I mean I'm like a lot of people in the places where we are know for advisors, but there's so many places where there are not fora advisors. Like we're we're biased. I mean, we're in New York, like you could there's many people that know for advisors, but if you go to other places, that that's not the case. So there's still plenty more uh room. And if you look at sort of the travel numbers, there's just so much more room. Like the the travel advisor channel is still very small. Um so we want to continue growing that. But really, it's about how do we make $100,000 of travel and make them into whatever they want to be, like whether that's $250 a year, they want to be a $2 million producer, how do we accelerate their journey? How do we take someone who's a we have many of our top advisors who are doing $5 million, let's say, and they want to build a $20 million travel advisor business. How can we help them do that? Evan and I sort of have this like early and Henley have this early emerging vision of could we have, you know, with AI and the tooling that we're going to build, a hundred million dollar advisor team of just a couple people. Like I think it's very possible to be able to imagine that world. Um so that means the products that we're building are really focused on that, which allows like incredible clarity. Um, and there's nothing like clarity to allow you to sort of cut through this decision-making kind of problem. Because I'm again, I'm like ADD and I want to do everything. So I'm like, oh, we could also do this and this and this. And like I sit in the shower in the morning and I'm just like ideas are like flowing through my brain of like things we could be doing.
SPEAKER_03Wait, are you saying you sit in the shower?
SPEAKER_01No, I mean I'm standing in the shower.
SPEAKER_03I'm but maybe you take a moment just to sit and think.
SPEAKER_01Because it's actually one of the things that we're I don't have a yeah, I would like yeah. I'm I'm often well, yeah, this is a long story, but I'm often like in the shower in the morning with like kids also like kind of just like rinsing them off too. Um so there's no there's not a very relaxing moment. But I think about I this is the place of a lot of great ideas. I was joking, I need like a waterproof microphone now with all these like dictation tools and AI, I could like be productive there. But it's actually like a calm place for me to actually think. But the um I'm I I hope I hope this this we're not cutting that from the episode, by the way. That's where I think. But actually, to be fair, it's where I thought of the whole launch plan for the booking platform. I like literally, it's I told told the story before. I've told it on other podcasts, it's out there. Like I thought of that in the shower. Like it just, it just this like light bulb moment came off about how we were going to launch our booking platform um two years ago.
SPEAKER_04Anyway, uh so I was gonna say I get it. I actually, most of my keynote presentations, um, my thought process, I pace around in the shower and actually like to do and and so now I'm sharing and maybe that's a little oversharing as well. But uh it is actually, you know, and and I think for everyone, you need to be able to access your creative mind. And um, and it's a great place to be able to do that because you are relaxed. So and that's why I was joking, because actually in my shower, there actually is a place to sit. And occasionally, if I'm having a good thought, I might actually just take a moment. So I thought maybe I found another shower sitter like me that um that uses that time as a as a valuable work time because it's it's for me, it's not an escape. It's actually like I'll get into the shower and I'm like, this is actually if I have if I'm not in a hurry, I'm like, I will slow things down intentionally to like capture those ideas. But I have not worked out the microphone or how do I dictate from that? But I have my phone outside and sometimes I look at it and like I want to reach and just make some notes.
SPEAKER_01I'm there, I'm there with you.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Anyway, back to some of the big plans for 26. The you're gonna be able to do that.
SPEAKER_01I do have a teak, I do have a teak chair, like a seat in the shower. It's it's like one of those teak things, but it's full of like it became the shelf for all the stuff that my kids need to access because we don't have like another low shelf, so you can't sit on it anymore because it's just full of like kids' toys and stuff. Um
so okay, clarity of product. So there's a lot of stuff that we need to do. Um, like I just mentioned, you know, like okay, we're gonna integrate with all these people and sell all these other categories. You're gonna hear me not talk about that because those are all supporting things we need to do. Like another one is room mapping. Like our current booking platform doesn't map rooms. We don't book children with all of our partners. There's like basic stuff that we will also do. Um, but when we think about it, it's really a slightly higher level. So there's three things I wanted to highlight. One is completing the build-out of our end-to-end workflow solution. So, this is also of the three things I'm gonna imagine, is maybe not the most exciting one, but it is the we need to do it. So, our advisors are currently using a combination of all the other tools that are out there for travel advisors, and we're going to, I mean, I think everyone knows by this point I've sort of danced around this, we're gonna build all that tooling ourselves. Um, internally connected to our booking platform and all the ways we work. Um, and so some advisors have used that tooling, some are using other things. We don't, we I literally don't have all those features. Like I don't have all the automations and workflow tools. We'll have that uh at various points throughout the year for people to use our way, complete with your branding, and it'll be fully white labelable so you can have a full client experience at your own domain name with you know instant itinerary creation using all of our powerful technology uh for your travel business. And you will be able to support not only like single travel advisors, but full teams of people that want to collaborate. Um, so that's a big focus for us this year. So there's account delegation and access controls and all sorts of like, you know, no one wakes up and says, I want to build permission systems for tools, like when they're, you know, like a kid, you know, but we have to build that. Um so that's a whole that's one thing. And then we have a whole pod dedicated to the advisor enablement workspace. Um the the the fun parts of that are like integrated marketing. So this is one of the reasons we bought Legends, this AI company that gets to know people through their like, you know, calendar and email data, and also just kind of the like kind of thinking process of Shana and Stephanie, um, who are now Shayna is now one of the VPs of product. She runs this pod, um, thinking about uh, you know, how to leverage data to make advisors more successful. So we have this incredible data mode where we can actually learn about clients, um, suggest things, and this is where sort of the better equation of travel comes in. It's like we we built this other tool last year, which I didn't even get to mention yet, this like integrated deals tool, which goes around and scrapes deals from all of our partners because you can imagine that hotels don't just make all their deals easily accessible in like an RSS feed. Wouldn't that be nice? So we've built scrapers and we have manual ingestion techniques and we can take PDFs. Like one of our hotel partners sends us like a PDF of all their deals. We have to like ingest it, match the hotels to the hot actual hotel database name, you know, and like then figure out if we already have the deal or not, and put like the booking window. Anyway, we can we can now say, okay, this is a client who likes staying at Four Seasons, great. Like they want to go to Florida, great. There's like oh, look, there's deals. There's three, four seasons in Florida, there's deals at them, like let's promote them. You hey advisor, maybe you should send these deals to your client. Um we can automate all that kind of stuff. The second big bet we're gonna make this year is uh the client booking platform. So this is also not a unique idea. Virtuoso, like you know, for their advisors has their own client booking platform, travel with other people have client booking platforms. Ours is you know, I think better. Um we have all of this amazing supply. Um and just like it's this is like the next iteration of bookable quote. So bookable quote, I send you a rate for a hotel, you check out. So this is like a couple layers up from that. I just let you authentic so you first of all, actually I missed something. You authenticate yourself because this is a closed user group, it has to be you. You see the quote, you pick one of the options I've given you, you check out. The client booking platform is just a few more things in there where you authenticate. Now you you could see a quote that I've prepared for you, like, hey, I Dan, I've created some hotels in Paris for you, just pick one of these. Or you could say, I just want to look myself and I want to just go and book a hotel in Paris. So there's a lot of travel that's gonna come from this. So we know that um uh travelers are not working with their advisors on all of the travel. They work with them on the big stuff the Africa Safari, the honeymoon, you know, the big family multi-gen trip. It's Thursday night. You know, what happens on a last-minute basis? You're looking at the weather and you're like, I want to go to Florida tomorrow because it's gonna be a blizzard in New York this weekend. So you it's 11 p.m. You're not gonna like write your advisor. You need to book the flight and you need to get a hotel right now. So you're just gonna go book the direct with the hotel, miss out on on the opportunity to leverage the collaboration with your advisor. That's that's gonna be a thing of the past. So we will launch this client booking platform. This is where uh we're sort of reliant, this is where we like really bump into the world of existing travel tech. So the interface is not quite ready for the consumer yet. Um so we're figuring out when we're gonna do it. It's gonna be an alpha at the end of April of excuse me, at the end of March, and then it'll be a Q2 launch. Um I don't we don't have exact plans because we're still working on some of the things like room mapping and some of the other technology. But that's coming. Um we can talk about that. But we we also just on that, we don't Evan and I have really Evan has sat down and mapped out like what is that gonna do to our business. And I think it's going to um fundamentally change how much travel we sell. We just have no way of knowing how to model it. So uh we have some estimates, but it's gonna be interesting. The third area is obviously AI. I mean, like if I didn't I mean if you couldn't have figured that one out by now, uh like what are we doing here? So we we you know, and I know you want to talk about this too, like the role of AI with travel advisors, but AI is obviously empowering everything we do. And I think everything changed in the last three months for me personally. Like AI tools just sort of it's like a whole new world. Like forget about before three months ago. So I'm on my computer, we're now and and this is another thing that's unique about us. Like Evan and Henley and I are in using AI all the time as founders. We're trying to encourage people to do it. I have Cloud Code on my computer. Cloud code now connects to our BI tool. I don't need to go into our BI tool and run reports. I can just literally type, hey, tell me um the channel breakdown for the bookings by for this hotel from this period to this period by you know, segmented by like different advisor types and longevity cohorts for uh that's like a very complex kind of thing to do, actually. I mean you can do it in RBI tool, but this this is take a little while to put together that view. This does it in like uh a minute and it everything has changed. So I just pushed I mean, this will surprise some people. I'm the CTO and the CPO, but I actually pushed our first my first uh pull request to our back-end repo uh yesterday, or maybe two days ago, um, to update font files to a new compressed format. I mean it's like a no brainer, but I did it with cloud code just to see if I could do it with cloud code. Um because we had I noticed that one of our font files was downloading a um a TTF or TFF file that's not compressed, and I made it a WOFF2 file. And the team is like, hey, what are you what are you doing? And I per I'm an engineer. I've like, you know, have a CS degree. I particularly have decided not to code because it's a very slippery slope where it becomes addicting for me. So like I'm now gonna start coding stuff. I just can't resist now building my own stuff. And I think I've resisted it, but now I'm gonna do it. And um I think AI has changed everything. So the model is now there. So how this affects advisors, coming back to this, it you look at cloud code, what it's been doing for me and my workflow, um uh in my own like just regular work. I I think about it now as like, okay, Claude Code embedded in our portal for advisors, which you know, for those of us who were around in the old days, we might be this is like the Microsoft Clippy on, you know, like on steroids embedded in. Like, and we, you know, I have people on my team look at me like we have a young team, they're like, Microsoft Clippy? Like, what the hell are you talking about? I'm like, uh and I go pull up a picture of Microsoft Clippy and I'm like, wow, this icon is really old. You know, but I don't know when Clippy ended its life, but um it's clearly a 90s thing. And so it's like there's a lot of other products have embedded AI agents, but when you think about it in this like real embedded way, what it could be doing for you, both in a in a reactive way, but also in a proactive way, this gets sort of interesting. So now when we think about all the components of portal, so I think about I'm a brick layer. So I think about like these different bricks of things. Like we have a CRM, we have like advisor enablement tooling, we have the booking platform, there's like advanced rate intelligence in the booking platform is another brick. Each of those components has UI training UI associated with it. Um, and we spend a lot of time with product design and making the UI really work really well and investing in quality. So that's one way you can interact with all of our tooling. The other way now is everything has its own AI interface, whether that's MCP or whatever comes out in the future. Um we can do that. One of our engineers, funny story, uh had a had his first kid um in the fall um at one of our newly promoted directors of engineering. And while he was in the NICU, he built um a plug for his open source framework, Django Rest Framework MCP. So if we we build in Django, REST Framework is this um plugin for Django that builds APIs and REST framework. He built this one MCP open source package that turns that into an MCP interface. And we use it. So we've now this unlocked our ability to very quickly build our own internal AI agent. Um this is it, I have it works. Um it's embedded. Uh we're good, we're not ready for prime time yet. Um, we're gonna be rolling this out sometime in Q1. And it will do a few things for you, and then it's gonna do a lot more. So now we have this whole work stream around embedded AI agent that's gonna be really exciting.
SPEAKER_04So I want to just highlight, too, that you have been a key part of our AI summit over the last couple of years. And so many of our listeners know Jake. And actually, Stephanie's joined us last two years as well. So I'm you know, I was thrilled about the whole legend integration, given the fact that you obviously have a core competency around AI and obviously need to bring in additional talent. And the one of the things I just wanted to call out though, as we were having that conversation, for any of you that are listening to this, just to make sure some of the terminology that Jake mentioned that is obviously second nature to him, BI is business intelligence. So having access to those reports and also MCP, which is what everyone's talking about now with like model context protocol, being able to use AI agents to be able to uh access external data. So being able to query databases or even form a more complex task like sending emails. And what I wanted to highlight to all of our listeners too when I walked in today, um, and this is where you guys walk the walk. Evan was actually using a uh microphone. Tell everyone about his setup, because I know I mentioned he is walking, but he actually he doesn't type because he was saying, I actually I find it I can't really type in a meeting. So he actually talks out his emails.
SPEAKER_01Tell us Yeah, uses Whisperflow to talk. Yeah, like microphone. Yeah, he's always talking. We're like, Are you talking to us? Um But I do this too. My wife is because I I mean Siri is the worst. Like, hello, Apple, if you're listening. I mean, please, let's make this better. I mean, I hope the new Google partnership will make dictation better. But like I talk, I used to think talking to Si like to do text messages was was was silly. And then at some point, um I just I was like, okay, this is actually much easier. Um I just wish it would actually spell out things correctly and like know like it's obvious what I'm saying, but in context of the message. But you can't seem to get it right. But whisperful actually does a much better job. Um and so he's using that a lot more. Um and what's interesting is like you could be doing something on your computer, like searching the web, and then like you know, claud code is running in another screen and uh if it then asks
you for something, and you can just like speak into it and say, Okay, yes, do that, please, you know, and it just becomes a new way of interacting. Um I actually think though, but like this is very apt. So I'm at dinners, I was at a dinner um for a friend's birthday party in Pittsburgh in October. Wow, that seems like years ago, but it was just October. And um, I'm at this table and people are, you know, we're talking now about travel because it's one of the things you do as people. And I'm like, you know, some people knew I was a travel, I'm you know, I say owned a travel agency or built a travel agency. And so we're talking about where people like to go and like why he was a travel advisor. And some guys are booking four seasons directly at this dinner, and I'm like, please, like just call me and let me help you get, you know, better rates and and options at the four seasons. Um and uh, you know, so I'm now like they're they're like, oh yeah, this is my name. I knew their names, and I just I left the dinner and I'm like, okay, I'm gonna remember all this stuff to go do. Of course I forgot it all, and I have to write my friend to be like, remind me all the people that were at my table like I need to go follow up with. But my my idea was like, how come I can't just like take open, take open my fora app into this AI agent and just say, okay, I met you know, John at the dinner. He likes this, this, and this. And his email is John at like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Please add him as a client and put an opportunity to like a reminder for me to send him some of the deals that are at these hotels and these locations. Two, I met this other person, Steve. You could just like dictate this, or you could copy and paste from text messages or take screenshots from your phone and put it directly in our agent and parse all this stuff. And the agent can go and create new clients, update existing clients, um, create trips in your workflow, create proposals and itineraries, eventually create bookable quotes automatically. You're like, okay, you know, like let's say we're walking to the subway and you're like, hey, I'm going to Paris next week. And I'm like, oh, when? And you're like on Wednesday. And I'm like, Do you have a hotel yet? And you're like, yeah, but I booked something. I could ref, you know, I could cancel it. And I'm like, okay, let me send you a bookable quote. And I'm like, okay, send Dan. I've got to talk to my agent. I go, send Dan a bookable quote for three nights at La Fantasy starting on Wednesday. Include the regular room and the junior suite, and then also include the Southern Hotel and the Southern Hotel, blah, blah, blah. Send it to Dan. And it could just do that. And so I this is very like we could have this now. So the reason we don't have it now is because we're building it now. But I'm hoping, you know, by the time we speak again, we'll have this and we can just play with it.
SPEAKER_04Well, and I think that's for both of us. This is I'm I find this time even more exciting than the dot-com era that clearly we both came into the industry or like that came into our careers, I guess, at a similar time, and embracing what was available then. Well, right now, there's so many incredible use cases for AI, which why we started the AI summit. And obviously, it's like been great to have you there speaking at it because the the problems you can now solve by having access to this technology they're very real and it's happening very quickly. And all of a sudden you're having one breakthrough after another. The one thing I wanted to try and demystify for all of our listeners, though, is what AI how from your perspective, how AI is actually changing how people plan and book travel, because there's Aspects to this from my perspective. One is, you know, for travel advisors, there's a lot of AI technology that can uh improve their workflow. And some of the examples you were just sharing there are about how how you become more efficient with your time and more effective with your reach outs because you can be that much more customized. And obviously, the uh legends integration, I had that huge wow factor when I first saw what they could build with this idea of a traveler DNA profile based on initially scraping metadata from your photos, then taking your calendar, which then gives you access to your loyalty programs and your flight times. And it, you know, it it learns more about you to be able to make customized recommendations. But a lot of that is on kind of the back end. So a lot of that is invisible to the user, and that's that's intended to be the case. So that my question, I guess, to you in two parts, when you think about AI and how it's going to change travel, how much of that is in the background and in improving systems and processes? And what of that technology do you think is exposed to the customer or the travel agent? How are they expected to utilize AI tools?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's a really good question. Um The first things we did were very much in the background. So we actually have this thing that just takes the all-caps kind of paragraph of room description from the GDS with no punctuation and turns it into like a bulleted list. The AI, like super simple. Like AI is a great secretary or transcriber, you know, and transformer. We actually built a funny version that turns it into like Shakespeare language or like run DMC. So we do we didn't publish. I would I really we should like do this version, but it was like it was like wrapping the room description. I mean, it's it's this was like you know, two years ago. Like, what can you do with the LLM? Like it, you know, make all of the GDS descriptions sound like run DMC wrapped it. Like it's kind of, you know, it's like we laugh, but I think that's the fun thing about this stuff. It's like very human, like it's it's just fun. So we made it an iambic pentameter. And it was, it was just hilarious, like reading the description of the room at you know, an iambic pentameter. Anyway, uh we used it to reconcile like reconciling uh it's so search. It's kind of like search on steroids, you know, it's like reconciling booking. So we get these huge booking files. We get, you know, these ginormous checks of consolidated commissions from our hotel partners, and we then it comes with a ledger of bookings and all sorts of stuff happens, like guest checkout a day early. That we booked it under this last name, but actually because the loyalty program is of the of the spouse, it has a different last name, they change the name of the booking and we don't, we can't like reconcile it. So AI is very good at just figuring all that stuff out. Um what else do we do in the back end with AI? Oh, parsing things like parsing the sort of like the booking ingestion that I mentioned before. That's AI. Um we use AI, so we use AI to transform, just like integrated transformation of text, um, you know, shorten it, lengthen it. Like we have all that stuff. It's sort of par for the course now in propos in our proposal builder. We just launched something uh two weeks ago for everyone. It had been in beta for a little bit, um AI ingest. Other people have had this in the advisor tooling space. So to give full credit, we're not the first people to have this, where you could take a third-party itinerary, like so. You work with a DMC, they give you this beautiful itinerary, but it has their branding all over it. It looks, you know, sometimes better than others. It's not what you want to show your client. So you ingest it uh into our tool and it transforms it into our itinerary builder format. Um, and then you can share it with your client. So it's kind of like magic. So we've done thousands and thousands of these have been built uh or done over the last couple of weeks. Um people are really very excited about this, and there's a lot of room for improvement. Um, you know, we could like uh make certain blocks transform better. And we're we're going to really push forward on our builder technology for our itinerary products. So we'll have to keep iterating here to make it look better and better and allow advisors to customize the look and feel of it more and things like that. So that's that's a real thing because advisors were spending hours transforming these things manually. So this is like one of these great tasks. It's like, okay, five hours to like recreate the itinerary in like a better format for your client. Takes we we it's an asynchronous task. You you upload it, the tool does it. They take between three minutes and fifty 50 minutes, an hour, depending on um how many images there are and how much content there is. Uh, but it runs asynchronously and just lets you know when it's done. Then you get this itinerary, you got to proofread it, and then you can send it to your client. So that's a kind of I mean, that's kind of both front-end and back end. I do think there's a world where that gets really smart where then it starts attaching the content to like, oh, this is a hotel. I can actually pull more images of the hotel from the Fourier image library to and you could prompt the advisor, hey, do you want to supplement this itinerary with more stuff? That's really interesting. The community, when people ask me um what's the most important thing about fora, they say it's gotta be the technology, but actually it's the community. Um, I've also said this over and over again. That you really cannot replicate. So the community has all this shared wisdom. Advisors are talking in WhatsApp groups, it's very temporal. Like, what's the difference between this room type and that? I mean, they're very detailed questions. Like, okay, three people staying at this hotel, what's the difference between this room type and that room type? This kind of stuff doesn't exist on the internet, but it exists in our community. So, how do we make this available to other people in our community at scale? So we're thinking about how to organize our information in better ways to make this more automatic. Um and I think that's really where AI is gonna be felt more by the advisor. It's it's just I don't want them to feel like they're, you know, using AI in a way that that's like using
AI. It should just feel like it's part of the product. So it actually the magic is, and I've been saying this, you know, since the beginning. I don't think the magic is good. Like LLMs will continue to evolve. They're gonna be amazing, they are amazing already. I don't I'm so glad I'm not building AI tooling because you know, like I I feel bad for startups that just kind of get like Claude reaches a new, you know, launches a new feature, entire startups will get like wiped out. But it's kind of like Mac, you know, Apple used to do this, like there'd be all this software built, and then all of a sudden they introduce that feature into the OS and everyone's like like an entire company like explodes. Um I think you you see this a lot in AI. I don't want to be predictors of you know who's gonna win and not win in like the AI infrastructure space. So we're we're we're applied AI users, we're buyers of AI technology, which is a really fun way to be in this kind of revolution because we get to sample everything and play with it, um and then figure out how we embed it and use it. So we're an im an applied or uh applied or embedded AI company. And I think, you know, I would Evan and I were wondering if we were maybe the most interesting applied AI company in New York. I I'd say there's probably a case to make that we are actually. And um uh so you know, I I I think the interface to the AI is probably the most important thing um about how this works. And so it's not like the chatbot was not like the end game. The end game is actual product that feels magical because part of it is powered by AI in the background.
SPEAKER_04Well, there's a specific question I want to ask you on this about how you actually structure your AI efforts internally, because I'm also keen to ask you about culture and we'll come to that in a moment. But before we do, when you talk about embracing AI as an organization, clearly in startup world, speed is paramount, you know, speed to market and being able to embrace new technologies and be able to uh utilize them in a way that you can more rapidly scale your business. But at the same time, there's risk inherent with that. So, you know, if you are implementing new systems, everyone still keeps talking about AI hallucinating and you know, it's gotten better and better, but there still is risk associated with that, even when you get those results verbally from you know, ChatGPT or otherwise, it's like double check this information. So when you guys are building with AI, yourself, uh the engineering team, how do you approach the kind of, I guess, that speed trust and making sure that it's truly useful? So, how how do you structure your AI efforts internally to make sure, as you described, you're you're it's exciting to be the end user of this technology and figure out how to embrace it. But uh there are challenges. So I'm sure many of our listeners, that's why I'm always trying to be mindful of one of the questions, you know, questions they would want to hear you answer. And I think that's one that I think a lot of if you guys are you know ahead of the curve at any other company in New York and how you guys are applying this technology, then I'm sure our listeners would love to know how how how do they approach it successfully as well.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Um I definitely don't have all the answers here. Um I'll share a few things, but I'll also first say that we honestly have no idea how to really structure AI and our team. Like we've gone through a few. I mean, really, like I mean, I love the candor. This is I mean, we just I we just spoke about this at the board meeting on Wednesday, and Yossi and I sit around our Yossi's our VP of engineering and sort of my main partner in crime on this stuff, and we're sitting around going, like, how do we do this? There's lots of existential questions. Like, so the thing I put in the board deck was vibe coding to production. Like no one has this answer. How do you and I I refuse to, you know, everyone's like, like, I just vibe coded an entire production system. Great, like, try to maintain it. You know, and I just think there's a little bit of false. If you just sort of look at like Twitter and sort of what people are saying, you can be lulled into this thinking that it's like so easy. It is easy. I made this pull request that changed all our font files. It messed up. It changed the file name. That other it changed a file name that was imported to another file that didn't have proper test coverage on it, broke something. Another engineer helped me out. Um, it's it's not so easy. And we deal with this too. So we've we've I'll I'll I'll say a couple things. Um we we restructured our engineering efforts. We had an AI pod that was separate, and then we said, you know, that's not the right way to do it. So now we have AI embedded into every pod. We created this role. I mean, we just had to come up with a name. It's called AI Innovator. Okay, what is it? It's like a bit of a product manager, a hacker, someone who just understands AI and can like do stuff with AI. We have AI innovators, we have a handful of them. They are all slightly different. Um, they have different strengths and weaknesses. Some are more data science-y, some are more like they've been applied AI people. I'll give you an example of a hallucinate a hallucination. One um of our AI innovators, um, uh Eric Singh, who came to us. Um, actually, you know, probably Stuart Grief. He was a recommended Stuart uh connected Eric Toss. Um he was doing um media creation at an agency that helped like TikTok people create content for TikTok using AI. Great. We have a lot of social media advisors use social media sell. So the th we launched, very exciting. Uh I'll be the first to tell you, we launched four labs. Um, like, you know, Google also has Google Labs. Uh it we our icon is if yes, it's a it's a Erlenmeyer flask or beaker, you know, with like little bubbling water with airplanes flying out of it. We spent a while like using AI to make our icon. Um that's fun. Um we ended up with like anyway, that we went down a rabbit hole of like playing with the image generation tools just to make the icon of Four Labs. But anyway, our first Four Labs feature was called the social post generator. That's very much Eric's like wheelhouse. And it looks at your past booking data as an advisor and suggests like advisors do this stuff on social media where they post things like just booked here, just booked here. And it I follow a lot of our advisors on Instagram and I'm watching all this, and I'm like, FOMO, FOMO, FOMO. I want to go here, I want to go here, I want to go here. It works. Or deal here, deal here, deal here. It works. That's why people
do deals. So we built this tool. It automatically, you could say, I want to show deals in a city or deals of this hotel brand, and it produces images that you can then you can adjust in the in the tool, you can adjust the text of the image, you can like make it look like your branding, and then you can download the images. Um, it pulls the images from our vast library of supplier images and destination images, and then it it um and deals, obviously. So the deals that we talked about before, like scraping all those deals, is a big part of this, knowing your so integration to knowing your past booking history is a big part of this. You download the images and then you can turn it into a reel or a slideshow, whatever you want, TikTok or Instagram. You can download it in different formats for the different social media platforms, like formats meaning like, you know, Square or different uh aspect ratios. So uh it was doing advisors pointed out, first of all, I thought this was gonna be mildly interesting to people. People were the feedback we got from advisors, we just launched this maybe two, three weeks ago, was enormous. People were like, you know, I was so hesitant to do this. This is like so easy, it just gets me going. The feedback we got was like, can it do this? And can it do this? And can I do this? And can I do this? It's just like a fire hose of ideas. And so we're like, okay, great, Eric. Like, we know what you're doing the rest of the quarter. Um, you know, social post generator v1.1 to you know, v4. Um and one of the things that it was doing though is so we said you need to look at this stuff very carefully to make sure it's accurate. So I don't know where it got this idea from, but it was somebody showed images that they had downloaded where it was talking about the rooftop infinity pool for hotels that like clearly didn't have a rooftop infinity pool. So this was kind of hilarious. So I think the um, you know, the answer to your question, when the AI needs to be accurate, there's ways to do it where you can build checkers in the process. And whether that's other AI looking at the output of the AI to check it, and you can get pretty close to being 100% accurate. Or you just build human in the loop review, um, where you know, for reconciliation, for example, it has to be we have to be accurate there. Um so we can say, okay, I know that this is this, but for anything less than a certain confidence threshold, like I need you to actually look at it, or you can have like sub-agent processes kick off and try to like do some investigation. That needs to be accurate. So you can build those systems in a way to be 100% accurate. And then on the Gen AI side, it's like, you know, hey advisor, you need to just read this to make sure it's good. That's usually enough for now.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. Well, clearly a lot of people are going to be attracted to fora given the way you are embracing in AI and even the way that you uh highlighted the fact that you guys are figuring out as you go, right? And it's like, but you're embracing this, and you're like and so uh that that is a place that many people want to work to do their best work, to bring like um and also to be able to do really innovative things. So talking about the team and the culture and the fact you know you are building for scale, you obviously have to have the right team and the right uh people on each of those pods uh that are gonna be flexible and that are gonna be able to uh embrace innovation, uh rapid change, and also be responding to what you're hearing from your travel advisors on how you want they want to see you improve the platform. So knowing that that you've got a long list of probably outstanding requests, the things you're like looking at your roadmap and your pipeline as you add more product. But when we think about talent and the organizational structure where you guys are now, how are you preparing for this growth in 2026? And specifically, what roles are you trying to hire for? Because a lot of these people are in great demand.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's a good question. I will just say one thing. I I just switched laptops and I had to re-sticker my laptop. I like stickers, and my new favorite one is it's uh it's on the roadmap sticker. This has become a kind of joke. And I I tell her, they're like, Jake, you just tell us it's on the roadmap. And I'm like, yeah, I sort of do that. But it is really on the roadmap, like just, you know, I don't know when on the roadmap, but everything ends up on the roadmap um to some degree, unless they're occasional bad idea. But um so I don't actually remember exactly how many engineers we are right now, but let's call it 50 something. We're hiring our budget for this year is to hire 55 more engineers in New York in person. So if you're hearing this and you are a front-end, back end, full stack software engineer with some experience um and you're want to work in a great in-office culture hybrid, like three or four days a week, depending on how far away you are from the office, please apply for travel.com slash careers. Um that's you know a pretty significant hill to climb, 55. Uh, I don't know if we'll get there or not. I think when we think about this, like, okay, AI will make our engineers more efficient, it already is. We still are going to need all those people because we're dealing with stuff that is just left and right. There's so much work to do. Um so that's you know, I think the where the leverage comes from AI is like, okay, product managers can be twice as effective um in how they're writing product requirements and directing so this like ratios that existed of you know one pm for a pod of eight engineers. Maybe it's like one p.m. can actually oversee like two pods of engineers. And so I don't know where that's gonna end up, but I'm not so worried about it. We're hiring a few more PMs. Um, we're hiring people to do product ops, like things don't operate themselves to some degree and support. Um, so we do have a very, you know, this is another area we use AI. We use intercom and we use Fin, their AI product. Um and we just uh our our director of product ops and support was just on a panel last night at at a fin hosted event in New York. And their average like fin, you know, assisted AI completion rate on tickets is like in the 60%. We're at, we're the, I mean, we must be their best case study. We're at like 89%. And we only launched that recently. So we're hiring for that team. Um we're hiring to build out like people with specialty and travel around various things, like our groups and crews and international markets and tour operator businesses. There's room to grow there. Um, we need some designers. So uh product designers, if you're an excellent product designer and you want to work on our team, we have a great product design team built out by Alex Daniels, our head of product design, who's also reports to me. Um, we would love to have you join. And we're hiring, you know, engineers with more of a focus on data science. We need more AI innovators. We're hiring a PM that's specifically looking at our data. Um, on Shana's team, we need we need engineers to work on our finance pod. Some people love that, some people don't want to do that work. Um, I actually think it's quite exciting. Um there's a lot of fintech in New York, so I think we're gonna be more vocal about um finding engineers that have come from like the many great fintech startups that are in New York that are a sort of a curve or people are growth or growth curve where people are ready to look for new things. Um we don't hire people on the engineering side straight out of university. We hire more experienced, like you need to have uh some number of years of work. Um it's just this is sort of how we've figured out that it works best for us, where people are sort of already semi-fully formed, capable engineers. Um, we do need more engineering managers. This is a job that is hard to hire for. So if you're a great engineering manager, um, we would like to talk to you. What else are we hiring for? We're hiring a lot of people. Um we we just expanded our office. All of our jobs are on our website. I'm trying to think. I know I'm not thinking about something that I'm gonna regret not saying.
SPEAKER_04You mentioned two things that I'm sure uh perked people's ears up. One is the uh in-office culture, so in-office environment, and you've leaned into that, which I'm assuming is a very intentional choice, but also the location. So I want to ask you about both of these together because I thought it was really interesting when you mentioned those. Clearly, I love New York City. I'm so happy to be here. A lot of your uh team members that I know, I was asking them, you know, how they get to the to work, and they're like, oh, it's a 10-minute walk or it's a 20-minute subway ride. Like it's like in there's obviously a lot of talent in this city. There's a lot of great universities and colleges where people would have graduated from and they're in New York City because they want to do their best work and have these types of opportunities. I know that speaking from someone who's based in Toronto, that's one of the things I love about the city of Toronto, is it attracts a type talent that people actually they they want to work for great companies and and and be able to do something that to really contribute. And it's it's I I also do think there's more of an East Coast phenomenon to the West Coast, having lived in uh Orange County in terms of like work-life balance is that actually, you know, people on the East Coast definitely live to work more than work to live. And I think at a certain stage of life, that's and if you love what you're doing, um, like I do, and and most oftentimes it's like the um I thrive when I'm just like I'm not fixated on the work-life balance. I'm just really enjoying the work that I'm doing because you're committed to a mission. And I think that's more of an East Coast phenomenon phenomenon. But what I want to ask you about is the in-person, because we've had railbookers. We did a spotlight episode with them. They are very intentionally home-based. We talked about the fact that like 95% of companies are now back working in office again. And so there has been a difficult transition for some people if they wanted to kind of remain remote. I've always worked in offices. It's always been my reality uh growing up and uh in my career. And I thrive in an in an in-office environment. You get to network with other people, you get to learn. And some people have said, you know, this next generation, if they work remotely, they're not going to have the access to advancement because their their bosses are not going to be able to see them in such a way and give them the mentorship that you can have remote. So I I see many benefits to both different scenarios depending on the company and culture. But my specific question for you, Jake, is you know, the in-office culture, obviously, I'm assuming that's a very intentional choice. And then how do you see New York City from a competitive advantage point of view for Fora?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, great, these are great questions. And um, you know, personally, uh I grew up as a consultant. Um, so I was a remote worker to some extent, you know, before this was like a real thing. Um it was a little bit easier before Zoom because you could, you know, be on conference calls. Um, I've spent hours and hours on like old school conference calls, you know, with like all the jokes about like people beeping in and the the young people don't really appreciate this anymore. But it's like um, you know, with my BlackBerry traveling the world. Um and so it was always I I loved you going to clients. Like you'd go to a client and then uh you know on Friday I'd be in my home office and like see people. And um, you know, part of that was like the tech wasn't as good. So like you had to, like if you wanted to see people, you really had to see them in person. I think it was incredibly valuable, like working alongside people. Also, we were also more focused because we weren't online, like you had to dial up to like connect your email, and then we could look at a deck and sit
there together and look at it without you know notifications and distractions. But, you know, we being in person, like I I was I led this project at at Walgreens for their photo department. I'm like, I don't know how old I was. I guess I was probably 25. And people could see that I was young, and I'm like presenting to like C-level executives of Walgreens in person. Like that kind of experience. I I just think you you need to have these kind of in-person experiences. It also just makes it a lot more real. Uh, but I've always worked with remote engineers. I mean, my second consulting job was working um at Infosys in like 2004 to 2008. We built a strategy consulting group in the US, and I was the 21st person in that group, the youngest person on that team and the strategy group. I mean, emphasis at the time was 20,000 people. When I left Infosys in 2008, the whole group was like 110,000 people, and it was insane. That the sort of Thomas Friedman World is flat kind of era that really grew like exploded in that time. And um it's still like it just so seeing this like you know in person mattered so much. Like we'd spend so much time in the evening getting to know our colleagues at dinners and just interacting with people as humans. And so I think when we sat about building this company, um there was just no, it wasn't even like a we it was a conscious choice, but there was no alternative. Like we weren't going to be a remote company. I do think if you want to build a fully remote company, it can work. I think this hybrid thing doesn't work. Um you either have to be, and this is you know my personal view, uh like a fully remote company, and everyone is remote. You have norms around how that works. Um, and then you gather in person at these offsites or retreats, which if you're a fully remote company, we are very happy to help you book your corporate retreats. Um just contact me. Um always be selling at travel. Um but uh you know, and New York is a great place. Like people want to come to the office. So we're we're hiring and I I actually didn't think when we were gonna do this, the engineering team would all be here. And Yossi got here about just before our first end of our first year. I was like, we're gonna do it. We're gonna build an in-person New York culture. I said, Okay, let's do it. Um, you know, and one by one, we started building this amazing engineering team. And now I sit around with a bunch of new joiners every month at our new joiner lunch. Um, and we're like, why did you come here? And they're like, the people. And so we hear recruiters tell us all the time, it would be easier if you could allow remote engineers to work here. And we're like, yes, this would be easier. It's also very simple. If you don't want to be in person, like drop out of the funnel, boom, now we don't have you in the funnel. We can focus on the people that want to be in the office. And everyone that comes here on our team, we haven't had a problem. I mean, knock on wood slash fingers crossed. We, we, you know, has chosen to be in person. Now, do you need to be in person every day? I definitely, you know, as a consultant, enjoyed those because you weren't on camera, but I like wake up in the morning and as a 25, six-year-old, like after a late Thursday night, and like, you know, sit down and be on conference calls and at my computer all day, like in my boxers, never getting dressed, like in my apartment, and then be like, oh, it's 6 p.m. I got to get ready to go out on a Friday night. Like there I'd had many of those days. Or I could like fly to Miami where one of my closest friends lived for the weekend and sit at the at his pool and like sit with my black. I remember there was a day where I had like my feet in the edge of his pool on my BlackBerry all day, you know, on these global conference calls with people from India and people all over the world doing my work with my laptop, like at the pool. And the other people were people at the pool where worked in like nightlife, so they didn't really have anything to do during the day. So there's like me and this like weird crowd of people at the pool. Um, you know, those I like I was very productive at those times. So I and I can see just how productive all the engineers are because I can see the code. That's one bit of work that's easy to sort of monitor what people are doing. I also trust our team immensely, so I'm not like worried. We don't hire people that we don't trust. Um, so people can be remote a little bit. I don't mind that. And we do encourage people, because we're in travel, to go take remote weeks and go work remotely. Like go spend a week with our hotel partners in France and work. Like uh, you still have to be involved in the New York office hours and um like get to your meetings. Um but I do think this person in-person culture just makes it really like you look people in the eye, you have these meetings. It it just it is a balance of like how you, you know, what do you do? Because people are sick. So it's like you don't want people to come into the office. So now like one person in a meeting is not there. So what we did do is when we built, we we got this office, we were like, we're going to have best in class in conference room Zoom technology to make it really immersive. So we spend an ungodly amount of money. I mean, like, I can't, like this Logitech stuff that we have for the Zoom meetings is so expensive. So we found a partner, they built out these amazing conference rooms. You, you know, you can hear everyone on Zoom, it works well. It's the best you can get for Zoom, except for I've been in the Google office where like it's kind of they have meat and these huge screens. It's it's really amazing, that's better. But this is without spending $100,000 per conference room, the $20,000 per conference room solution, this is pretty good. Um, so you know, we deal with that. Um, and often we're on phone calls with partners that are all over the world, anyways, and our advisors, which are everywhere. So there is a lot of Zoom interaction, but it is just really nice being in person, especially for the founders, as you mentioned. Like Evan Henley and I can just sit and do we just have these like little interactions. We also text all the time. We have our little founder chat that's just you know like nonstop. We come in on Monday, it's like, oh, I've been talking to you all weekend. But um, and then actually sometimes we're in the office, we like don't we're like ships passing, we don't even see each other uh because we're all in meetings, but it's just great. Um and so we're gonna continue, we're not changing. We have a couple people that are not here, our head of flights is not here. That's a very specific role. We have one designer that's not here that worked with our head of designer. These like one-off things work, but uh with with there's no other real exceptions uh made to this in office culture.
SPEAKER_04And then New York City itself based, yeah, for travel.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so New York is great because um I mean it's the same reason why my wife and I like living here. She's French, and like we get to see a lot of our French friends because they're passing through New York. Um, people pass through New York. So the entire travel industry passes through New York. So it's almost overwhelming. Like every night you could go out with a hotel that's here, um, or a cruise partner or something. So uh this week we have this Italian intensive. There's an Italian um true is here next week. And so some people came early and we're doing a fora advisor two-day like Italy training here in New York. And suppliers are here, suppliers show up because they're here. We also have a ton of hotel partners already here, so we see them on a regular basis. And everyone, all the major roadshows pass through here. So um Carito Hotel is there. Roadshow was last week. Uh J Mac, his rep company, his hotel shows were last week. Um, you know, I just RSVP'd for the new IHG or the IHG uh like luxury portfolio thing that's happening in in March. LHW is here. Like everyone comes to New York. So we have this opportunity uh to see our hotel partners without
having to go anywhere, which is really a benefit. Like if you're and we hear this from advisors in our community, um, you know, if they're in a second-tier city, they don't get to see as many hotel partners. Um, but we do have these chapters, um, fora community chapters in all these places that are trying. And one of the things we're going to do is try to organize more events in places where hotels do not go to bring, to say, like, hey, we have 50 high-producing fora advisors in uh Pick a City, like Denver. Um, so maybe you should consider going there. If you go there, we'll co-produce an event with you to try and bring more volume there. So this is the benefit, though, of New York. There's a ton of people, and people walk to the office. We have this. The other thing that's kind of fun is people come to fora HQ from all different backgrounds. It's more than any other place. We have people from different walks of life. It's a real set of diverse people from in every sort of category, you know. Obviously, like nationality, gender, race, religion, sexuality, but like also just other ways, like background and kind of like interests and college degree majors and stuff like that. So it creates this really rich environment here that I don't think you get in other places.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. Well, I mean, it the timing was perfect for me uh to meet with you and be here this week because uh for exactly your reason. Because of the blizzard. Well, yeah, that's coming up, but I'm I'm I'm Canadian, so I'm looking forward to that actually. But the um, you know, there's the uh IMM Trav Media Conference on here. Uh what was the New York Times travel show is always like now it's the adventure travel show. Uh Skift obviously is based here as well. They run their Skift Global Forum. I love coming to New York City and I I love that actually there is all these travel industry events here. So it's perfect timing for me coming to town this week, looking forward to seeing you and then coming to the office. And so clearly I get that New York, and I many people don't even may not even realize that, but just what a hub it is for the travel industry. And then the other thing, uh, when we think about this industry uh going forward, given that you've you know you've got yourself in a prime position uh geographically, but also as you look to expand this business, you there's you know globally, obviously you're in like you know one of one of the world's greatest cities to be based in to grow this company. But when we look forward, Jake, I've got a few more questions I want to ask you. And specifically, I want to talk about what your vision like for 2030, because 2030 is coming up close. So when I think about the next few years, it really is 2030. You've talked about you know doing a billion and a half in revenue, there's a hundred billion dollar opportunity. You clearly and the rest of the founding team see this as a opportunity for life. You guys are like, so it's not you're not looking for a fast exit here. So you clearly have an even longer-term view. So I would I guess my question is more in like in a medium term. So like we've talked about some of the big developments for 2026. If um, where would you like the business to get to by 2030? What is kind of the next few years looks like uh for Fora?
SPEAKER_01Hmm. This is a very interesting question. I mean, it's easy to sort of know where we're gonna be at the end of this year, well, or where we plan to be. Um and it's sort of easy to paint this like 10-year vision. Um it's hard to know exactly like where we'll be in four years. Because I think when I look at so four years would sort of like I guess twenty six is four more years. So it's sort of like double the the age of our company. And if you look at what we did in the last four years and you sort of like extrapolate that forward, it it's kind of it's almost it's hard to imagine the the curve um if you sort of you know, if you think about it exponentially, because that's it's what how how it will happen, hopefully. So I do think um I think AI is gonna be a part of our daily lives like much faster than we realize. Um both from a personal productivity standpoint and like just you know changing the way we work. Um it's really hard to imagine what that looks like. I I have a hard time myself as even as an imaginer. Like I just don't understand yet how it's gonna do all this stuff in theory for me. Like, how is it gonna do my taxes for me in two seconds? Like that'd be nice. Um as I start you know getting all these emails with like my tax documents that I need to go download. I'm thinking about like could I use Cloud Desktop to like organize this for me?
SPEAKER_04Um things what I was just gonna rephrase it slightly because to be more like I'll I'll fix this on the edit. Um is uh what success looks like in four years. So like as your growth trajectory, what are some of the I take us through the success metrics for 26 and where you think you'll be, what success looks like four years from now.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I don't have the exact numbers because I haven't I haven't looked at our like budget for where this gets you in terms of how much travel we sell. Like like, you know, I know the tenure number we want to hit, but I don't know what that looks like four years out. But I think from success, it's really like we're able to um fundamentally change. I think there's two things that have to be true that aren't true now. One is we will be the the evolution of our advisor, the advisor-client interaction will be significantly different. So with the client booking platform and bookable quote are just the very beginning and our interactive itineraries and things like this, but there will be a really different way. So this idea that advisors and travelers co-create travel experiences together using the platform that we build for them, like in a in our we launched a mobile app last year also. Like I didn't even mention that because it's um, you know, in like an app or something like this, and they're really like co-creators of this journey. And you have this like kind of like personal fitness coach, kind of like travel advisor that's like helping you make your decisions. Like, I think this will become a reality. The other thing, and this all gets back to this sort of a better equation in travel. So the tooling for advisors will be significantly better. But like what will be new is really uh things on that access, like the advisor client access. But then we will have portals for our suppliers. So the the this notion of being a distribution channel for our supplier partners will become a reality in a much more serious way. So right now we sort of are takers of what's given to us. Like we're takers of the preferred partner rates, we're takers of uh the deals that are out there. We just sort of, I mean, not in a greedy way, but like selling them. We're taking these offers that everyone can have access to if you're a member of the preferred partner program or like you're a B2B seller and we package them up and do things and we get them available to our advisors and sell to clients. Hopefully, we'll become such a big channel. I mean, it's sort of the way we think about this is not like we want to grow the advisor channel and almost make it so there's like a fora channel. Like we are a scalable, it's like the advisor channel, but it's like slightly different, um, meaning that it it's more scalable. So if you're a hotelier and you are wake up on Tuesday and you're looking at your numbers and you're like, oh, I got some cancellations, my Saturday is soft. You're like, okay, I might go on Expedia and just like turn some knot dials and knobs and like feel bad. Or you could come to Fora and say, I need three more rooms sold on Saturday. Do it. And we'll say, Great, you know, and we can do it, and there's like an acceptable cost for that. Um now one way would be that they pick how they want to do it. Like kind of like, okay, we're gonna offer enhanced commission, or we're gonna offer we don't want to touch our ADR, so we'll offer like a huge extended dining credit because we have an on-site restaurant, and we'll get the person in, we'll give them a free dinner essentially, or half of a free dinner, which you know what ends up benefiting us because then they're gonna buy stuff and we can make a lot of margin on our F and B. And a free Sunday night, because like people don't stay Sunday nights, you know, for weekend getaways from New York. And then um, let's say it's a New York hotel, and that's Tuesday, but like it's Tuesday, so we need to get that. I can't like send an email and then have advisors like think about it. I need to get that offered to clients now. How do you create that pipeline where a hotel you could upload this thing? We could say that offer
is relevant to all these clients. All those clients have these advisors, and we can actually pipeline that offer to them very quickly, and they could know by Wednesday morning that they have this offer available to make a decision about what they're doing that weekend. Like that, that is the stuff I would like to build. And then the ideal would be kind of more like this ad words mode. I mean, we get requests from our hotel partners all the time. Hey, we have we need some help with this property. Like we have some amount of money we want to spend. Like, what can we do? And it's like a webinar. That like the tactics are the old tactics in email. I'm thinking like, okay, we need some new tools here. And the tools could look like specific things like they could pick from, or they could be more general, like actually kind of ad word style. So imagine a hotel goes, I want to spend $10,000 and acquire, I don't know, some number of new people at my hotel. And we go, we can solve that for you. Let us optimize it. And we actually will like tell you what the cost per new person is in the end, or you can set it like a threshold you don't want to go above. But that's how you do ad words or you know, advertising on on Instagram. How come hotels aren't thinking about it that way? And I think that's where I think the sophistication will get to. And I want to be the company that helps build that technology and platform out. And I think the OTAs will do that stuff too, but it's a very different model where you have the human in the loop. And this gets into this other thing we talked about where if you sort of have this like world of AI maximalization where AI is doing everything for you. Like just imagine the future in 2030 where like you have nothing left to do because AI has done everything for you. Let's be a little bit provocative about it. Like you literally have nothing left to do. You're just going to dinner parties. What are you doing at those dinner parties? You're talking with people about what? What are you talking about? Travel, food, like I don't know, a movie you saw, TV show, recommendations, your kids. So like travel is one of these things that everyone talks about. So it's a very human thing. And I imagine that a lot of these people will will decide to be travel advisors, um, you know, to be a part of that ecosystem and help people connect. Um, not everyone wants to be someone selling travel. So like the people who want to do it will be able to do it and they'll be able to sell to their network um of people that they know travel.
SPEAKER_04Well, and that's like the the uh the question I want to close off our discussion with is exactly along those lines, because when you talk about getting offers in front of travel advisors for the rest of the old school industry out there that came into the uh did this world pre-internet, we also know that most of these offers were being sent by fax. Like a fax machine was a was actually the main way to get those offers out. And companies were having their team members design like a um design what is basically a flyer and sending flyers over faxes. And those travel advisors were getting them on the fax machine, pinning them up in their kit in the kitchen, um, where they'd be having lunch, they could see the different offers and they would be talking about it. And even the trade media would. Is so print focused and know those publications, the weekly, um, you know, travel weekly. There's a reason the names even uh is like it was a weekly publication of a synopsis of what was happening in the travel industry this week.
SPEAKER_01I used to read like PC weekly, though. I used to get this like delivered, you know, as like a teenager to my home to my home.
SPEAKER_04And this is where yeah, oftentimes what's old is uh new again. And the and our industry, for all the advances in technology, it is a people-driven industry to exactly your point. You know, people are still talking to other people. And there's so my I've got a kind of a big profound question I want to close on, but it ties everything together, which is you know, when you look to the future and think about uh the role of the travel advisor, what makes you most optimistic? And I asked that, um, knowing everything we've discussed over the last, you know, two hours in this conversation, like how bright the future is from my perspective and clearly from your perspective from travel advisors, but a lot of people start hearing about AI and you know, how is it going to change? And we don't have all those answers yet. But what makes you so optimistic about the role of travel advisors going forward? And I just uh the reason I caveat that when we look at when we look back is that many of the things that we still have in the industry, um, brochures uh and even like direct mail, and as you launch more luxurious products, this the the role of the travel advisor has continued to thrive and all indications point to that continuing to be the case. But I'd love to hear what why why you're so optimistic, Jake.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think that's a really that's a that's a really great question. I you know just thinking about how to answer this. I think the the I think it comes back to the human piece of it for travel advisors because when you look at what people are going for in travel, so there's a number of factors that sort of come together here. So one is um what makes a great travel experience. And there's obviously a number of components to that, but I think travel is one of these things that it can be amazing, um, you know, or like still pretty good and obviously bad. And what what differentiates these kinds of trips is not like it's not necessarily the room product, it's the service. And the service is provided by people. And I do, you know, like I look at the um I'm from New England, you know, like uh Austin Rob Robotics. Um yeah, it's Austin Robotics, right? The people that make the robots.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, the dog.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, the dog, right? Okay, that's what I'm saying. Yeah, like the dog.
SPEAKER_03Like, oh we're all trying to build dogs. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Like, yeah, it's like I mean, it's a cool kind of thing. Like, right, so um the um okay. So some just like how you know I say to people, like, if you want an AI proof job, be a chef, but not like a quick service restaurant chef, because I actually know people that have built salad robots, you know, like um you you you know, luxury dining is still gonna be food is still gonna be prepared by people, like um ad Michelin-strawed restaurants to some degree. So there's certain things that cannot be replaced. And I think the the hospitality aspect of of travel is going to be provided by humans. And so actually there's this, and the humans are traveling, and so it makes sense to have a human travel advisor in this loop. Um, I also think the psychology is like another example would be there's many ways I can go online and get fit, like with apps, you know, like um that will tell me exactly what exercises I need to do. I have a Pelotonic can tell me exactly what I need to do. I have there's many other things I get Instagram ads for, like ladder and better men, and like like we, you know, like there's other guys that have businesses selling you know kettlebell workout routines and um there's a little insight into like what but Instagram is telling me to get rid of my dad bot, basically. But like the um uh you know, but there's nothing that replaces the the coach coming to your house because you you know, there's a person that's gonna be standing there at six o'clock in the morning. You need to be ready to exercise and they're gonna be making you exercise. And if you haven't done your they're gonna notice if you did not do anything between the last time they were there. Now, the the instruction might even be worse or not as good as like the best workout routine that you could find online, but it's because they're there making you do it. So I get I I see this with, you know, I think all the travel advisors will have this with a client's like, I want to go to Italy again, and you're like, okay, great. Like I'll quote you Italy. But I also just want to point out that you could go to five other places, nothing against Italy, because I one of the things I want to do in life every day is like go more to Italy. But um I also, you know, think that there's a time and a place for going other places. And so the travel advisor can be this kind of like friend who knows you that prompts you. And I think I do think that even though AI will probably be able to get to the point of being able to not give you exactly what you want, but also tell you the other things that you're not thinking about, like um there's a a human element where you're you just kind of want to chat about it with another human and take with their advice. So and I think this gets back to this AI maximization world is like as all this stuff becomes more like we're gonna talk to machines a lot more. But so I think there's going to be joy in talking to humans around certain things, and I think travel will be one of those things. So I get very excited about the role of travel, entrepr like entrepreneurs, travel advisors, people selling travel. It's just a sort of human thing to do. Um, I do think it needs to be empowered. It needs to be more people doing it, and the people doing it um could be doing a lot more of it. And I think this will become the, you know, I guess my vision would be like maybe 80% of travel is sold through a travel advisor in the future. Let's like see where we are. We we'll have a podcast in 20 years and we'll see if we're we're there.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. Well, I know one of the things that Jake and I have been talking about through 2026 and beyond is to actually have regular check-ins on these types of conversations. I'm sure many people are going to be interested to see how the conversation evolves and also the the roadmap and some of the major developments that that fora has on. But I just wanted to finish on this particular point because when I close out any of my keynotes, like I did at World Travel Market, I gave like the top six AI trends for 2026. And the first five were all around the areas about you know earn media and optimizing for AI and voice. Actually, the whole trend of voice that I mean as a species, we uh, you know, we were never really intended to sit down and type on keyboards. I mean, the whole idea of a QWERTY keyboard, and you have a computer science degree, you should be referred to as a as a CS. One of the things that, you know, in my computer science classes, and when we learned about the QWERTY keyboard, it was designed to slow us down. It's um, you know, it was designed for typewriters, and we've kind of got stuck with it. And so when we think about the how this industry is going to evolve, I'm incredibly I'm um, I think it has a very bright foot future. I'm very bullish for a number of reasons. And the reason as it relates to AI is I think in a world that is going to be AI saturated and it's coming, and in some ways it's already here, trust and authenticity will win. And I think one of the things that I want to make sure that uh as an outcome of this discussion today is that any organization is listening to our conversation and looking at AI and trying to understand this world of travel advisors, is that don't lose the human touch. The human touch is actually what's gonna be your moat. It's gonna be what is your competitive advantage, is the relationships that you've built, that people trust you on their recommendation. And it's this AI-generated content is actually gonna get worse for like that because it's gonna become much more generic. So if you can embed more authenticity, unique voices, local knowledge, and trust signals, we are so wired to trust one another. It's like why we use sites like TripAdvisor is that throughout human history, other people give us shortcuts and that actually helps us advance. And those shortcuts are having someone that you can trust and rely on that is a human that can actually understand your perspective and curate experiences that ultimately will give you a great emotional experience. And I think more and more we're gonna want to enter the world, and that's why I've coined this year as a year of transformational travel. It's been building for many years, but people are seeking travel and the types of companies they embrace, which is why I was excited you have experiences. And I know you highlighted, Jake, that you know, some of the integration is still to come, but that's that the those businesses, G Adventures, uh Intrepid, those are billion-dollar companies now that were a hundred million dollar companies only a few years ago. So when travel advisors are looking at the types of product their clients are asking for, one of the things I would definitely encourage everyone to pay attention to is transformative travel and you know, people having these incredible experiences in destination. And we're starting to see travel companies kind of present themselves
with sort of an anti-AI element because the fact is, you know, you have a truly human experience in destination. All of your senses are heightened. I'm here in New York City and I just, you know, that that buzz that you feel. And I'm gonna have a weekend in New York City. My wife's flown in, we're gonna stay at the Peninsula Hotel, we're gonna have like, and the and for me, after a busy week of work, this is what I the joy of travel. And that came from a travel advisor who recommended it, who's put something together. How did you how did you book your hotel? What are you talking about? Okay.
SPEAKER_01Oh, you did, okay. Yeah.
SPEAKER_04My for advisor um strongly encouraged the peninsula. There was a deal that they had, and uh there was a hotel credit that I now have access to, which now I'm gonna be mindful of how much I spend over the credit. Um, but no, it actually it came from a travel advisor. It was the recommendation. So it was like, you want a perfect weekend in New York, you need to stay at the peninsula. This is what you're gonna do. You're gonna have to and and you need to experience the hotel. That was something I was not just a place to stay. It's a real destination.
SPEAKER_01It's destinations in and of themselves. Like stay, I mean, I'm I would love to staycation my way around New York City. Yeah. Like I have a long list of places that I would love to go. I did staycation right across the street as the four seasons uh New York downtown. And before Thomas, the former um who used to work there, um he he's longtime friends with Henley. So I did a little my wife was like, you could just go do a little staycation there. And yeah, oh man, that was that was nice. Oh, that's awesome. Like lying in bed, and I'm like, I'm just gonna stay in bed here.
SPEAKER_04Exactly. Well, there was that term that came out this last year of uh Herkel Dirkling. And Herkelderkling is a Scottish term, but it's not heard this. Herkelderkling was one of the trends of 2025, where people just basically spend the entire day in their hotel room, like laying in bed, like rotting, bed rotting as my daughter would call it. Um, but for people like us working on our laptops or like, you know, getting work done but intermixing it with the Netflix show and just like I'm just gonna work in my room all day. And some hotels have had to adjust adjust to that trend to try and encourage people to come and stay at their hotel, knowing that they're gonna be this mixture of business and pleasure. And the the last thing I wanted to say on this, the keynote speaker at the conference I was at this week, uh guy named Doug Shapiro, who um brought his expertise in data. He did a presentation on agentic AI. And it the final slide he had was the good news authentic human experiences will be more valuable than ever. And I just uh it it resonated with me because that's how I close out my presentations, because I truly believe that's to be the case. So I'm very optimistic for the future of travel and the role that fora will play in that. And so I know many people would have already been familiar with you, Jake, on our podcast, um, and also uh to an extent with fora, but I'm sure many people have just come to hear about fora for the first time, understand more about you. I want to make sure that everyone knows the best ways to connect with you guys. I will do be doing an outro of this, but I want to make sure uh, in your words, how would you suggest that people reach out to connect with you for opportunities to collaborate, join the organization, or for people to become advisors?
SPEAKER_01Sure. Um so I guess there's sort of four ways. Uh if you want to travel with an advisor and you do not have one already, you can come to our website for travravel.com and um we have a nice form you can fill out. Uh it's a it's not it's a nice interactive form. This will go or we look at these and we actually will help you match with one of our top advisors um based on how you answer the form. Um so this is our client lead program. I should plug this as well for advisors. We have a very big client lead program business. If you're a pro, we have different levels of advisors. So if you're in our top two levels, you get access to this and you can sort of like you don't bid, but you like kind of express interest in different leads that come in based on what you're interested in. And then if we decide to give that to you in a sort of round robin fair situation, we um you get to work with that that potential new client. So this works really well. Um uh we've we sell you know single-digit high millions of dollars a month of travel um through the client lead program. And many clients, you know, many advisors have found meaningful lifetime clients um through this to this thing. So if you're a traveler and you want to work with an advisor, fill out that form. If you want to be a travel advisor, uh there's also a button on our homepage, you know, join us, um, fill out that form, and uh you will go into our membership team um and we'll talk to you. If you're a new advisor, we have ways for you to get all your questions answered. Um, if you're an existing advisor and you want to come and learn about what it's like to move over to Forum, we can answer those questions. And we have um case studies and every, you know, whatever you want, we can help you with. Um if you are a partner, uh, we have there's a partner with us button in our footer, click on that. Um, that will get you to our partners team. We probably already know you, but if there's a new partner, um, that's a great way to get in touch with us. And if you want to work here at HQ, uh we have a whole careers page. We would definitely like to talk to you. Um and uh can yeah, come join our amazing HQ environment. Uh we actually, what's cool is there's I don't know how many are out there now, but we when we started recording, which was like you know a year ago this morning, this is a long episode. Um, there were at least uh three or so advisors in the New York area. We invite some of our top advisors into our office on Friday to come and hang out and have lunch and work. So I'm excited to go over there and see them. Um it's always great interacting with people from our community. Um so uh yeah, come join our our in-office magic here in downtown uh New York.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, and I can speak to that. It's real. And I'm thrilled that I was had the opportunity to come in today. Obviously, it's always great to see you, Jake. But seeing you on you know home court advantage in your natural environment, where you come to every day, meeting the team. Obviously, it was fantastic to meet Evan and Henley and see Stephanie and Shana and Olaf, who's your chief of staff, yeah.
SPEAKER_01He's putting together, we're in our new like emerging. This is the by the way, this is the first podcast ever recorded in our brand new podcast studio. Yeah. Uh so let that be a record also or a milestone.
SPEAKER_04It's an honor to have had that opportunity to come in and record this with you. I certainly looking forward to to more collaborations, but ultimately I'm just excited for you and the team with the success, what you've accomplished, and how bright the future is. So thank you for making this happen. And I wish you and the team every success in 2026 and going forward, Jake.
SPEAKER_01Thanks, Dan. And I hope you have a great weekend in New York.
SPEAKER_04Thanks so much to all of our listeners for joining us for this special spotlight episode recorded live here in New York City at Foras headquarters. It's been a real pleasure to get to meet the rest of the team, see Stephanie and Shana again, and of course, meet Evan and Henley, the two other co-founders that Jake has talked about in this episode. I can't encourage you enough to check out forATravel.com if you want to become a partner, if you want to become a travel advisor, or if you want to join the amazing team here at Fora and what they're building for the future. As you heard from Jake, this is a company that did 1.5 billion last year, and the long-term future is a hundred billion dollar business. It's really an exciting journey to follow. I look forward to coming back to New York, continuing to have conversations with Jake and the team. Thanks again to our listeners. I hope you enjoyed this special spotlight episode on Fora Travel. And don't forget, we do post clips and highlights on our social channels, which you can find at Travel Trends Podcast on LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram. Until next time, safe travels.