Women in the tourism industry were disproportionately laid off during the Covid-19 pandemic. Fora is celebrating Women’s Month with a campaign centered on helping women take control of their careers through flexible, remote work.
While women make as much as 85 percent of the consumer decisions in travel and are the majority of hospitality workers, women were also the hardest hit during the pandemic. More than half of job losses in the industry were experienced by women, and the majority were women of color.
Now, in celebration of Women’s Month, we are highlighting a diverse array of women who have begun to design the future of travel on their own terms. These include sports broadcaster Tori Petry, fine artist and DJ Eunice Kindred and NYC-based entrepreneur Swaylah Faroqi. All of these women have built flexible careers as travel advisors.
Everyone I talk to these days is craving more passion-aligned work, and becoming a travel advisor is such a dynamic opportunity to build a new career. As a long-time travel advisor and mom of three, I co-founded Fora after seeing the need to transform a dated industry into something that was more tech-enabled, modern and inclusive to a variety of work styles and needs. Our campaign for Women’s Month celebrates core values that ring true at Fora year-round: community, inclusivity, economic independence and empowerment.
Since Fora’s launch in August of 2021, our travel advisors have earned meaningful income recommending and booking travel for friends, family and their professional networks — carving careers in an industry that previously relied on dated processes and tools. The waitlist of interested advisors has topped 80,000 applicants to date.
Gaya Vinay, the company’s first advisor, has booked more than $400,000 in travel alone.
“I love the feeling of collaborating with a family to book their dream trip,” she said from her home in Boulder, Colorado. “Knowing that I can do it in the comfort of my home while spending real time with my kids is icing on the cake.”
Interested parties can learn more about Fora’s work — as well as how to become a travel advisor yourself — through the Women’s Month campaign.
