She Started Using a Wheelchair and Saw a Serious ‘Chasm.’ Her Business Solution Led to $75M in Under a Year.

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.”

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