$1 billion travel agent platform Fora just landed its first CMO

Fora Travel, the AI-powered platform that links travel agents (the human kind) with people planning their vacations, has appointed its first chief marketing officer, CMO Insider can exclusively reveal.

Alanna Gregory has joined the company from Block, where she was VP of marketing.

The hire comes on the heels of Fora raising $60 million in a funding round at a $1 billion valuation.

The company said it would use those funds to bolster the AI tools it offers its travel planners.

Gregory told me her immediate marketing priorities are threefold: building an iconic brand, growing its advisor network, and developing a “best in class” sales and marketing organization.

Fora offers travel advisors tech tools and training to help them build their businesses in exchange for a cut of their sales and an annual fee.

Travelers looking for an agent fill out a short questionnaire about their ideal getaways before being matched.

The company said it has more than 15,000 advisors who have booked more than $3 billion in travel since its founding in 2021.

Allen Adamson, cofounder of the marketing firm Metaforce, told me that while Fora has made ground with investors and advisors, it still needs to work on building its consumer brand. “The CMO’s job is to make a promise to travelers.

Fora is up against formidable competition, from well-known travel brands like Expedia and Airbnb, to the AI chatbots consumers increasingly use to plan their trips.

Adamson said Fora’s promise needs to center on the experience that machines can’t fake: “The judgment of someone who’s been there and done that, and trust.” Gregory said Fora’s marketing is focused on building the future of human expertise in travel.

Its core market is millennials, who are often juggling the logistics of traveling with multigenerational families, she added.

Gregory said Fora is investing heavily in its Reddit presence, where many of its advisors are active, given that the platform is often highly cited by LLMs.

She’s also focused on designing the marketing team “for the AI era.” From product marketers to data experts, the team will contribute to a centralized “context library” database containing materials on brand messaging, audience personas, and sales call transcripts, so that the entire organization is training on the same data and can automate some of their work.

A post shared by Away (@away) Fora has already produced some buzzy marketing in the past, mainly focused on partnerships, such as its tie-up with the luggage brand Away and its launch of a concierge service with the dog-friendly airline Bark Air.

Gregory said she intends to draw on inspiration from her time working on Block’s Cash App, which she said was “completely unafraid to take big, bold bets” such as its launch of the browser-based game “Cash Apples,” which had a $500,000 prize pool. “It was highly contested within the creative marketing organization, and we stuck by it,” Gregory said. “It was a hit.” Gregory said that the Fora brand will similarly begin testing new marketing formats and “maybe take some of those bold bets.”