Jamie Biesiada
The 2025 trend of close-in bookings has continued into the summer.
For the past few weeks at Fora Travel in New York, 45% of bookings have been for travel taking place within the month following the booking.
"Summer is so last minute," said Fora co-founder Henley Vazquez said. "We had a record month in June. The bookings last week alone, we have millions of dollars booked last week for travel this week. We're just seeing this huge surge of interest in traveling."
Domestic travel is growing faster than international travel, she said, but noted that Fora clients are headed "everywhere, and everywhere last minute."
Vazquez largely attributed that last-minute trend to the uncertainty in the world, both economically and politically.
New price-drop feature at Fora
Amid all the last-minute bookings, Fora has introduced a new feature for advisors: a price-drop alert on refundable hotel bookings.
Right now, the feature is applicable only to hotel bookings made via GDS, Vazquez said, which make up most of Fora's hotel bookings. Bookings are automatically monitored, and if the price a client is paying changes by more than 5% or $50, the advisor will get an email alerting them to the change.
At that point, the advisor can alert their client, Vazquez said. While they could offer to rebook them at the lower rate, she said they could also encourage them to book a better room category with the money saved.
So far, the feature has saved Fora clients "hundreds of thousands of dollars," she said.
"It's certainly, as a travel advisor, something I would have dreamed of for years to not have a client go out and go, 'Hey, I found this better price now on this room that you booked for me,' which totally erodes trust," Vazquez said.
Fora built its price-monitoring technology internally.
Vazquez said it offers the host a differentiator from competitors in the leisure travel space.
Additionally, she hopes it gives advisors an inroad to close sales faster than otherwise.
"It also gives you the ability as an advisor, which is another big bonus, to say to a client -- as I did recently -- 'Yeah, let's go ahead and book this, because if the price changes, it's refundable,'" she said.
Given the feature's popularity among Fora advisors, Vazquez said price-drop monitoring will likely be built into other systems for other products outside hotels in the future.