Signs of progress

Black travelers weren’t surprised by MMGY Global’s 2020 study that revealed they had spent $129.6 billion on travel in 2019.

They already knew their market matters.

And no one should have been that surprised when, the next year, MMGY Global’s follow-up study showed that Black consumers’ decisions about to how to travel, and with whom they spend travel dollars, was directly tied to the way suppliers depicted them in marketing and advertising.

They had been saying that for years.

Despite calls from Black travelers and travel professionals for better, more equitable representation in the travel industry — at conferences and trade shows, in travel marketing imagery, in leadership roles, in press coverage, in philanthropic efforts, in destinations and itineraries — the travel industry has been slow to catch on. 

That is, at least, until the 2020 data finally said these truths out loud. The industry was going to have to take it seriously this time instead of allowing itself to be part of a problematic system built to overlook, underserve and ignore a demographic that, though clearly valuable, was untapped.

Doing nothing — or not nearly enough — was no longer an option. Lip service wasn’t going to cut it anymore. Black squares on the company Instagram feed were meaningless. And the annual posting of quotes from Martin Luther King Jr. on the third Monday in January, or publishing content about Black travelers at no other time other than February, wasn’t going to fool anyone.

Meaningful efforts were going to have to be made in a post-2020 industry if travel companies were truly committed to being part of a solution that includes and supports Black travelers and initiatives.

Three years later, the needle — though it still has a ways to go — seems to be moving forward.

Representation in marketing

Prior to 2020, a quick glance at an ad for a European vacation or a romantic African safari likely would have told the viewer one thing: Only white people travel.

Those same photos frequently also showed only thin, affluent, able-bodied white couples in luxurious settings. If the marketing budget was big enough to hire a larger cast, the presence of people of color was largely relegated to the role of smiling servants to these well-lit, well-traveled, heavenly-looking creatures. 

Promotional imagery like this is still in circulation today but is quickly becoming a relic of the past, thanks to new travel marketing campaigns from industry giants, among them Celebrity Cruises and Delta Air Lines.

Both companies are changing the people featured in promotional material to represent all those who travel, and each launched free public media libraries last year to reflect more realistic representation in travel marketing. Their media libraries are filled with images of travelers of all races and ethnicities, religion, ability, sexual orientation, age, weight and other diverse qualities that more accurately portray the many faces of travelers. 

“For far too long, ‘all-inclusive’ in the travel industry has meant everything on your vacation is included in one price,” said Celebrity CEO Lisa Lutoff-Perlo. “We set out to challenge this conventional thinking by imagining the phrase through the lens of others.” 

Celebrity’s All-Inclusive Photo Project features photos by renowned photographer Annie Leibovitz, along with Naima Green, a Black, queer, New York-based artist, and other acclaimed photographers and filmmakers.

Delta’s Faces of Travel campaign, which launched in partnership with Adobe, is a 100-image, open-source library available to anyone, including other companies, via Adobe Stock at no cost for use on social media and advertising. 

“Faces of Travel was born out of a Google search. When we looked up the words ‘people who travel,’ we saw that every single image showed one type of person,” said Shannon Womack, director of lifecycle marketing for Delta. “It was obvious that many of our travelers, who we have the honor of taking to so many different places every single day, weren’t represented in the most common way that most people are going about finding travel imagery online.”

The libraries feature a number of inclusive scenes, including mixed-race, LGBTQ couples photographed enjoying romantic sunsets; a Black woman who is a cancer survivor, amputee and wheelchair dance champion loving her time onboard the Celebrity Apex; and Delta capturing the joy of a group of Black girlfriends of different physical appearance and hair textures and length toasting with Champagne on a canal cruise in Amsterdam.

Focus on Black history tours 

Tour and river cruise itineraries that focus on exploring Black culture and history, both in the U.S. and abroad, are starting to appear in the portfolios of notable travel companies. 

Intrepid Travel partnered with Black Cultural Heritage Tours, a new company and travel initiative launching its first tours this year, that will highlight Black history in America that goes beyond the narrative of the civil rights movement in order to uncover the lesser-known histories of Black Americans.

Stephanie Jones, founder and CEO of the Cultural Heritage Economic Alliance (originator of the Black Cultural Heritage Tours) and a member of Northstar Travel Group’s Black Travel Advisory Board, spearheaded and recently launched her first tours to explore the Gullah Geechee people of South Carolina’s Lowcountry region.

The Gullah are descendants of the Central and West Africans who were kidnapped from their countries to become the first enslaved people forced to work on plantations in American colonies. The tour visits Black-owned and -operated businesses and restaurants and strives to make sure its partners get a fair share of revenue, exposure and opportunity.

“We’re really trying to create some economic benefit that’s going to go into Black businesses and Black communities through these itineraries. And not every operator gets or cares about that, but Intrepid does,” Jones said, adding that Intrepid, a certified B-Corp tour operator, isn’t looking for an easy way to profit off Black stories and is instead leveraging its resources to create equity for Jones, her team and their tour partner network.

“We don’t have a million-dollar, global, Black-owned and -operated tour company. We’re trying to become the first,” Jones said. “We know we could get there faster with strategic partnerships, such as what we have with Intrepid.”

AmaWaterways is introducing its first Black cultural history river cruise itinerary in Europe this summer, thanks to the frank discussions it had with a group of 20 travel advisors on a fam sailing last year. Many of those advisors were Black, and they wanted specially designed itineraries to offer to their Black luxury clients. 

“They gave it to me. I got an earful, and I heard them loud and clear,” said Janet Bava, AmaWaterways’ chief marketing officer. “They said, ‘It’s not just about tokenism. Don’t put Black people in the brochure and then not support our Black community in the travel business and in the travel space.’”

The company’s Soulful Epicurean Experience, a seven-night cruise launching in August, will explore France’s Black history in its southern region along the Rhone river and in Paris, where guests will tour the neighborhoods, cafes and jazz haunts frequented by the likes of Josephine Baker, Miles Davis, James Baldwin and other Black icons who found success in the City of Light.

AmaWaterways is already planning to offer two more Black history cruises in 2024 after the first departure nearly sold out within its first month on sale. But it wasn’t easy getting there: AmaWaterways had to face its own lack of representation in the images it presented of who cruises with them before advisors could pitch the cruise to their Black luxury clients.

Bava said AmaWaterways not only updated its brochures to show diverse faces, but it also worked alongside a Black-owned travel agency, Our Gang Travel, to craft the Soulful Epicurean itinerary that would attract the agency’s loyal ocean cruise clientele to something new on the rivers.

Industry initiatives and community 

Maurice Foley knew there was something left to be desired at the trade shows and conferences he attended every year as he grew his business as a travel advisor. 

Where were the stories of shared experience and community among Black travelers recounting their treks through Asia and backpacking trips across Europe? Where was the ample supply of Black-owned and -operated suppliers looking to connect with the audiences that their products catered to? 

Where are all the Black people in travel, and why aren’t they at the conferences he was attending?

“I created the Black Travel Expo because I wanted to have a meeting place with like-minded travel individuals, especially in the African American space,” Foley said, adding that learning about the MMGY Global studies fueled his motivation to launch the conference. “As consumers in the travel industry, we spend a lot of money, and I felt I needed to create a platform for everything ‘Black travel.’” 

The Black Travel Expo launched in 2021 in Atlanta as one of the first consumer-focused trade shows dedicated to the Black traveler. Beyond providing a networking space with educational sessions, guest speakers and roundtable discussions, Foley also wanted the Expo to foster opportunity for all of its participants.

“Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) was a big topic. Royal Caribbean and our other sponsors wanted to have that conversation and talk about their initiatives and what they’re doing to make a change in the travel space as far as DEI,” Foley said. 

2023 will be the Expo’s second year as it returns to Atlanta, and while consumers will still be its primary focus, Foley said the Expo will turn its attention to attracting travel advisors as exhibitors, guest speakers and panelists to connect directly with Black travelers. 

The Black Travel Expo joins an ever-expanding list of initiatives created in the past few years to include and support the Black traveler market, including Black travel advisory boards formed by companies like Hurtigruten and Northstar Travel Group (parent company of Travel Weekly) and the new partnerships companies such as Delta and Vrbo have formed with nonprofits to increase the profile and opportunities for niche groups within the Black traveler market.

While some might scoff at belated attempts to capture the attention of this $120 billion market, that’s fine — scoff away. 

But change needs to be recognized, just as efforts to be more inclusive need to be encouraged on the road to building a more engaging, more supportive environment for those long overlooked by the industries that they, too, have built and added value to. Highlighting the work being done today by travel companies to make space for Black travelers is the only way to measure the progress the industry has made — and how much further it still has to go.