Her Accessible Business Strategy Led to $75M: Luxury Travel, Fora

Key Takeaways

- After Morales’s mobility changed in 2020, the inaccessibility of luxury travel surprised her.

- A life-long trip planner, Morales joined Fora as a travel advisor and spearheaded its accessibility initiative.

- The business pillar now boasts over 300 travel advisors and $75 million in bookings in less than a year.

“Traveling and being a planner has been part of my identity my whole life,” Karen Morales tells Entrepreneur. Growing up, Morales plotted trips to Disney World; as an adult, she architected bachelorette trips and company travel during a career in advertising. But in 2020, Morales’s perspective on planning her travel adventures shifted.

Image Credit: Courtesy of Fora. Karen Morales.

The progression of her muscular dystrophy required her to start using a wheelchair. “ I tripped and fell during Covid,” Morales recalls. “I was homeschooling two elementary-age kids, baking brownies, doing Zooms, and I tripped on an area rug. It was not the huge swelling music moment that most people have, but all of a sudden, I couldn’t go anywhere independently without a wheelchair.”

Upgrading to luxury resorts didn’t mean accessible travel

For the first couple of trips, Morales upgraded to very nice resorts, thinking that they’d be able to accommodate her wheelchair. But they could not. During one stay in Hawaii — “at a hotel we’ve all heard of” — they gave her a room upstairs and suggested she enter and exit through the lanai, a covered patio. But the door couldn’t be locked from the outside.

A similar scenario unfolded when she attended the opening of a spa in New England. She had to travel half a mile through a parking lot to avoid contending with 22 steps.

“ I just didn’t understand this chasm is in the market,” Morales says. “That all of a sudden if you need help, a little something extra, why is it expected that you either have pretty medium-level taste, like you can go to a Holiday Inn without problems, but if you want to do a five-star experience, there’s a gap. I thought this cannot be real.”

Her consulting business gave her a head start on all things travel

An entrepreneur at heart, Morales had the experience to make all aspects of travel accessible, including the luxury end. She’d started a consulting business in 2017, and in planning her clients’ corporate travel, also fielded questions about how to take grandmothers with limited mobility on safaris, or elderly people who’d suffered strokes to Europe. She saw the potential for a sort of side hustle adjacent to her primary business.

So Morales began shopping around with different travel agencies. (It’s similar to the way a real estate agent chooses an agency to join, she explains). When Morales stumbled upon the travel agency Fora, her “spidey sense” went off.

Fora has booked over $2 billion in travel since 2021

Co-founders Henley Vazquez, Evan Frank and Jake Peters launched Fora in 2021. Since then, the agency’s global network of travel advisors has booked more than $2 billion in travel across over 180 countries.

Within a few weeks of Morales starting with the agency, the co-founders had her training other advisors on accessible travel. And after the first training call, they resolved to build out Fora’s accessibility pillar in an official capacity.

“We started quietly at first, just like every lean startup,” Morales says. “We had a few of us that were paid to consult and spend a lot of time building training and developing our own lists of top hotels and properties around the world.”

Image Credit: Courtesy of Fora. Karen Morales.

Morales had visited nearly 50 countries by that point, and Judy Tudor, another Fora advisor who also uses a wheelchair, has been to more than 50 — which meant a lot of helpful data points.

Travel agents and suppliers learn more about the accessibility initiative

It wasn’t surprising that a lot of agents wanted to get involved (after all, they’ve answered hundreds and hundreds of questions about accessible travel), Morales says.

However, a pleasant twist was just how many luxury suppliers — hotels, resorts, etcetera — wanted to get in on the program.

“ They’re really looking to understand this market more,” Morales says, “which is beautiful. We’ve had people offer to buy beach wheelchairs or ask for us to give them a review of how something really works. And I think that’s how things change. It’s about the actual hoteliers leaning in and saying, with true interest, How could I do this a little bit better?”

In training Fora’s advisors on accessible travel, the first focus was mobility. But they branched out into other accommodations, like food allergies, even though this is a more difficult space to navigate. (For instance, it’s relatively straightforward to track how many accessible rooms a hotel has. It’s more difficult to gauge its responsiveness to a dairy or wheat allergy.) Still, despite the challenges, Fora’s