Why we built Telios — and who we built it for
I founded Forest Travel in 1986 with a simple conviction: that the way you treat people matters more than almost anything else in this business. Not the destinations, not the technology, not the rates — though all of those matter too. It's the relationships. The trust. The knowledge that when something goes wrong at midnight in a foreign city, there's a real person on the other end of the phone who knows you and is already working on it.
For nearly four decades, that philosophy built Forest Travel — and eventually the entire Forest Hospitality Group — into something I'm genuinely proud of. From Forest Travel's luxury leisure roots, we grew into private aviation with Privé Jets, luxury cruising with Luxury Cruise Connections, high-end vacation packages with Ultimate Jet Vacations, private jet charters with Go2Jets, and hotel development and investment across Miami, Utah, and the Hamptons. Through all of it, the thing that stayed constant was the people. The clients who became friends. The teams who gave their careers to this work. The relationships that outlasted any single trip or transaction.
"The executives we served started asking us about their employees. And I realized we were looking at a problem nobody had properly solved."
Telios was born from a conversation that kept happening. Over the years, the C-suite executives and senior leaders we served at Forest Travel — people we'd been booking luxury trips for, sometimes for decades — started asking us something different. They weren't asking about their next vacation. They were asking about their employees. About the people on their teams who were traveling for work every week, booking on consumer websites, accumulating credits nobody was tracking, with no policy and no one looking out for them.
They trusted us with their own travel. They wanted to know if we could bring that same standard to their companies.
The more I looked at the market, the clearer the problem became. The large travel management companies — the Navans, the BCDs, the Egencias — are built for enterprises. For companies with dedicated travel managers, procurement teams, and millions of dollars in annual spend. Below that threshold, those companies get call centers, rotating agents, and an account manager who's too stretched to be proactive. They get the label of "managed travel" without the substance of it.
On the other end, the companies managing travel manually — booking on Expedia, using personal credit cards, with no visibility into what they're spending — are leaving money on the table every month and putting unnecessary burden on whoever happens to be doing the booking.
"There was a gap in the market that nobody was filling well. Mid-size companies that needed real travel management — and weren't getting it."
In 2022, we founded Telios to fill that gap. We built it as a dedicated corporate travel management company — separate from Forest Travel's leisure business, purpose-built for companies with $100,000 to $2 million in annual travel spend. We partnered with SAP Concur to give clients a proper booking platform. We brought in dedicated account managers and a team of named travel agents. We built the kind of program that mid-size companies had never had access to before.
The model is simple: one account manager, five named agents, proactive vendor negotiations, quarterly business reviews, and the same standard of care we've always held ourselves to. Not a call center. Not a rotating pool of strangers. The same people, every time.
To every client who has trusted us — whether you've been with Forest Travel for years or came to Telios more recently — thank you. You are the reason this company exists. The executives who asked us that first question. The EAs and finance directors and operations managers who gave us a chance. The travelers who let our agents take care of them.
We built Telios because you deserved better. I believe we've delivered it. And we're only getting started.
David Mendal
Founder & Chairman, Forest Hospitality Group · Founder, Forest Travel Agency, Privé Jets, Luxury Cruise Connections, Ultimate Jet Vacations & Go2Jets · Miami, FL
