Fora, “the modern travel agency,” recently launched a price-tracking tool, available to its tens of thousands of travel advisors, located in 92 countries. What does this entail? Should the price change more than 5% or USD $50 on any refundable booking, the travel advisor will automatically receive an alert.
As Henley Vazquez, Co-founder and CEO of Fora, told LATTE, once the advisor is given the alert, it’s then up to them to determine what to do with that information. The advisor, for instance, could tell the client they can now rebook at the lower rate or, if applicable, perhaps the clients can now book a better room category for the same price they booked the initial room at. “We can actually let them (the advisors and clients) know when dynamic pricing affects them in a positive way, which is really, really neat—and that’s something I never would have even imagined to do,” said Vazquez.
Most notably, the tool doesn’t take any decisions out of the advisors’ or clients’ hands, according to Vazquez; it simply provides them with more information, “so we are still the advisor.”
When LATTE visited Fora’s New York City headquarters earlier this month, over 100 engineers were on location working on some new projects. Said Vazquez: The stuff that they come up with are things that, as a career travel advisor, were not just things “I didn’t think were possible at times, I actually didn’t even know to dream of it.”
The goal is to provide the advisors with as many tools as possible so that they become the obvious booking channel for travellers. “In the advisor world, we have a lot of leakage,” Vazquez said—adding that travellers are being enticed by credit card points, OTAs like Booking.com and Expedia, and myriad other options—”so we try to really create technology that gives the advisor an easy and efficient way to be the best resource.”
A New Itinerary-Builder
Next up is an itinerary-builder for advisors and a client-facing app, LATTEcan reveal. While the advisor tool has already launched, there are still some functionalities being built in. For now, though, there is “no more cutting and pasting and moving Word documents around;” so long as the advisor has booked the experience through Fora’s platform, those details will auto-populate as a “beautiful itinerary” at the click of a button.
Soon, said Vazquez, “we will be launching an app, so that that travellers can walk around with this in their pocket as well, rather than having a web link.”
A client-facing app was not a top priority for the agency at first but Vazquez explained that “to be the best platform for our advisors, we actually have to give the travellers better technology, too.”
