Image courtesy of Diana Morales
The first time Diana Morales boarded a plane, she was leaving her small Colombian town for Chicago, where her family was moving.
“As a kid, you don't realize you have to leave your life behind,” she recalled. “When I turned 10 and it was time to move to America, I was so excited, and it took several months to realize that you're leaving behind everything.”
Luckily, Diana was born with a sense of adventure. She credits her safe, community-oriented upbringing with her free spirit. Everybody knew everybody. She climbed trees and played outside. She knew it was time to head home only when the outdoor lights came on.
“The first 10 years of my life, I was able to just be a kid — having so many playmates, having so many playdates, being in nature all the time,” Diana said recently. “Stepping into America is such a different thing. It was like, okay, you're growing up now. I really liked the side of travel that's all about adventure.”
A life-changing trip
Image courtesy of Diana Morales
In Chicago, Diana and her family settled in. Then, when she was 13, Diana was presented with an extraordinary opportunity.
“Every time I look back on it and talk about it, I'm like, this didn't happen to me,” she said.
The Oprah Foundation was sponsoring a school trip to travel to Kenya and Tanzania, where students would help a Maasai village. Diana was selected to go.
“I remember looking around being like, ‘Am I back in Colombia?’” she recalled. “It was so similar.”
It was during these three weeks Diana discovered her passion for travel, and for helping others.
“As a kid, you don't look beyond yourself a lot. This put me in a position in which I had to,” she said. “Suddenly, as a 13-year-old, it was like, my problems are not so bad. If I don't have the latest CD, I'll survive.”
The trip sparked within her a desire to know how different cultures lived, and to build meaningful relationships — skills she would eventually hone as a Fora Advisor.
Like a prayer
Image courtesy of Diana Morales
Diana spent much of her teenage years traveling with her church to help communities around the US. She loved being of service to others, and hustled to make the travel possible.
“I would go up to the people in the church and be like, ‘What do you need? Do you need your garden clean?’” she said. She also worked: “Every penny from my little McDonald's check is going either to college or travel.”
In college, Diana studied psychology with a specialization in child behavior. Upon graduating, she worked in behavioral interventions at a local school, and loved it. She married in 2020, and her husband got accepted into a seminary school in Amsterdam. The couple made the move, but Diana didn’t see how she could continue her current role in the Netherlands. But she had always toyed with the idea of becoming a travel advisor.
She took an online course, but struggled with its lack of support and further training.
“I didn't know how lost I was,” she said. “I knew this was my passion and that this is something I wanted, but it was such a hard year because nothing — it was going nowhere.”
Her confidence suffered. She knew something had to change: She needed additional training, plus mentorship and community. So she prayed. Shortly thereafter, Diana received an email that mentioned Fora, and saw two words: training and community.
“This kind of sounds too good to be true. There's no way I just prayed about this for 30 seconds and I already have the answer,” she said.
Make incredible experiences
Image courtesy of Diana Morales
Diana found Fora to be exactly what she needed — quite literally the answer to her prayers.
“It has been the best, best thing I could do for my business,” she said. “You make our lives so much easier.”
When Diana completed Fora’s Certified curriculum, her confidence increased. She felt more comfortable spreading the word and advertising her services.
“Knowing that I have not only Fora HQ behind me, but also thousands of advisors who have knowledge behind me, helped me to go a little further,” she said, adding how Fora’s community made her feel empowered to keep “asking questions, staying curious and not putting a limit on what I can do.”
Diana found the technical aspect of the training to be immensely helpful, but was especially drawn to Fora’s human-centric approach, and its focus on community over competition.
“You are there to make things special and beautiful and wonderful for people,” she said of travel advisors. “It can be easy to focus on just the numbers in a business. Whereas Fora makes it very personal: This is about people and how we can make experiences incredible for people.”
Diana was able to combine her loves — travel, serving others and relationship-building — into one fulfilling career. She focuses on staying kind and consistent with her clients. She’s not merely their travel advisor, but their advocate as well.
It’s about “being personable and being genuinely interested in caring for your clients,” she added. “A lot of our advisors are that way. I think we really do excel at trying to take care of our clients and building those great relationships.”
A travel advisor’s special touch
Image courtesy of Diana Morales
Diana specializes in family travel. Her mantra is, “Families who can travel should travel together.” Her family didn't have the means to go on far-flung vacations. She recognizes how special such travel is, and helps her clients get the most out of their trips.
Her background in child services makes planning family-focused getaways all the more fun: “I make sure that my junior guests are extremely well taken care of.”
She’ll work with the hotel to leave a stuffed animal in the room, for instance, and sprinkle in other delightful surprises throughout the trip. If a client is celebrating a birthday, she’ll make sure the hotel leaves “little birthday things along the way.”
“A big part of our job is getting to know who your clients are and what they like and what they're actually going to be delighted by,” she said. “I love a good safari, but you can't just throw anybody in a safari…Knowing who to put where and what they're going to like and honoring those likes and dislikes is my way of making things special.”
Diana is constantly learning and evolving, and continues to craft amazing experiences for clients.
“You guys are constantly innovating, constantly figuring out: How can we do better?” she said of Fora. “It inspires us advisors to also be like, how can we do better? Because we're representing you, and we're representing a great company.”
To Diana, every client is a VIP, something she says Fora has ingrained in her. But her genuine gift for bringing others joy is innate. She loves people, and loves learning about people. In fact, when she and her husband go to someone’s house, they have to tell their host to let them know when they need to leave.
“That's our rule,” she said, “because we have no self control. We will stay forever.”
