Hi {{ first name | there }},

Half of my inbox is auto-replies right now. It goes from “ooo until August” to “back on the 20th”. But the FutureTravel Summit calendar keeps me in a different rhythm: pitch competition applications close on Monday, we have a new event sponsor to announce (📣) and I spent quite some time this week on the process of hiring a new team member.

But hey - it’s also true that I have been enjoying watching the World Cup matches more than I thought I would after Brazil was eliminated. 🤩

And it turns out it’s been a busy week for travel tech. Let’s get into it.

Fora Travel, the New York-based platform for travel entrepreneurs, just closed a $60 million Series D at a $1 billion valuation. So, yes, it’s a new travel tech unicorn. 🦄

The round is led by Forerunner and Tactile Ventures, with Thrive Capital, Insight Partners, and Heartcore Capital all coming back for more. New names on the cap table: PLUS Capital, Amy Schumer's artist and athlete collective, BlackPines Capital Partners, and Tribeca Venture Partners.

This is Fora's second big raise in about a year, after $60M across Series B and C in April 2025. The bookings math explains why investors keep coming back: 36 months to hit the first $1B in lifetime bookings, 8 months for the second, 5 months for the third. Fora Advisors have now booked over $3 billion in travel since 2021, and total funding sits at $138.5M.

Co-founder Henley Vazquez was on our Top 100 Women Leaders & Innovators in Travel list earlier this year. Turns out that was an easy call.

💬 "Technology built against humans shrinks them," says founder Evan Frank. His argument is that travel tech has spent 66 years automating the advisor out of the picture and Fora is betting the opposite works better: give the human the tech instead of replacing them with it.

The platform has already automated the parts nobody got into travel for: quoting, live proposals, commission tracking. Now Fora's embedded AI assistant is layering on top, taking on the admin that used to eat a whole evening. In theory, less time on operations, means more time for the parts an algorithm can't fake, like knowing a hotel GM by name, reading a client's actual taste, sorting out a problem at the front desk at midnight.

97% of Fora's 15,000+ active advisors were new to the profession when they joined. Former physicians, lawyers, traders, retirees. LinkedIn ranked travel advisor one of the fastest-growing job in the US last year, so clearly the secret's out.

💬 "Fora is growing faster than any other company in AI travel," said Tactile's Brian O'Malley. Nothing like an investor doing your marketing for you :)

The new money goes into further developing their embedded AI assistant, new markets, growth in cruise, flights, and enterprise, and more hiring.

July might be famous for being the month where lots of Europeans set up the coolest “out of office” replies on their emails. But it seems like the M&A gods (and their comms) have been busy:

🇩🇪 Omio is acquiring RailEurope. They spent years competing for the same tourist trying to book a train across Europe. And now (combined!) they'll sell over 22 million train tickets a year across 28,000+ operators in more than 70 countries. RailEurope keeps its name and the trust it’s built over decades with SNCF, Eurostar, Trenitalia, and Deutsche Bahn.

🇮🇹 BizAway acquires Uniglobe Alliance Travel, one of the Netherlands' leading travel management companies, strengthening its footprint across the Benelux region.

🇩🇪 Holidu acquires Gites.com, the Rotterdam-based holiday rental portal with around 4,000 properties in France. Its 14th acquisition to date, and the first in the Netherlands.

🇧🇪 Daymaker raises €750,000. It’s a small round, but we like giving visibility where it's due. The Belgian platform has grown a 1.25M+ traveler community sharing real trip stories, content brands now license for their own marketing.

When Cabo Verde qualified for the World Cup, flight searches to the islands jumped nearly 7,800%. It looked like a demand goldmine, but... it wasn't:  81% of that spike came from markets with no routes to the island.

Search volume and bookable demand are very different things, and the distance between them can cost money. Digital Sardine unpacked what the World Cup really did to travel demand, and why hosting it, playing it, and a viral spike mostly don't convert into bookings.

Digital Sardine has spent spent 15+ years doing only paid search for travel brands, across 30+ markets. Want the same eye on your own account? They're offering a free Google Ads audit before the 2026 planning wave.

Request Free Audit

This is the space where we collect AI-related questions from our readers and share replies from experts in our network. Here is this week's question:

🏆 Right place, right time
Great things happen when the right founder ends up in front of the right people at the right time. That's what our pitch competition is built for. Applications close on Monday (July 20th), so don’t wait to send this to a startup you think should not miss this! We partnered with Cloudflare, ElevenLabs, HubSpot, Notion, and simpleshow to put together a package that founders can put to work right away. 🙌

See you next week,
Ana

The content of this newsletter is curated and published by Ana Metz, an innovation expert, passionate about technology and excited about the future of travel.

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