The tourism marketing agency MMGY Global reports that concerns of both safety and representation weigh heavy on Black travelers. But Black travelers face unique challenges. Black travelers in the United States spent nearly $130 billion on leisure travel, both domestic and international, in 2019. While these may be the first organized, mainstream efforts to tackle the lack of diversity on group tours, Black tour guides have been operating for decades amid a growing Black travel sector. In February, the group traveled together to Antarctica, where they held sessions on marketing to, and investing in, Black travelers. Other group tour organizers are also making strides: Intrepid Travel last year launched a new marketing policy that involves a series of inclusivity pledges, including ensuring that at least half of its partner creators and influencers were Black, Indigenous or people of color companies like Outdoor Afro are encouraging the Black community to connect to nature.Īnd the adventure cruising outfitter Hurtigruten Expeditions has created a six-person Black traveler advisory board, offering each member a $5,000 consulting fee, as well as a matched donation to an organization of their choice that supports Black travelers. “There are a lot of diversity initiatives out there, but this is something that has never existed in group travel until now.” “It’s been an open secret that if you look around at conventions, hiring conferences, or even internally at staff and independent contractors of companies, you don’t see much diversity,” said Mitch Bach, TripSchool’s chief executive. New York City-based TripSchool, which builds online and in-person courses for tour guides and tour operators and last year launched a diversity initiative, is providing the curriculum. Pathways is a group effort - initial investment came from the TreadRight Foundation, the Travel Corporation’s nonprofit arm, and funds are managed through the nonprofit Tourism Cares. Other training programs will launch in March and August. Their first director training program, with 20 participants, was offered in various locations across the American South in December. “We have to change the whole paradigm of how companies find, recruit, train, place and mentor people in this industry,” he said. Burnette, is the cost of entry to the industry - training programs come with price tags of $5,000 or more, with no guarantee of employment at the end. One of the biggest hurdles aspiring tour guides face, said Mr. Burnette have since teamed up with a handful of additional organizations to get more Black and Indigenous tour guides into the industry the result is the Pathways Project, which provides free courses and mentorship for qualified would-be guides. That 2020 phone call seeking guides came from Richard Launder, director of the Travel Corporation, a global organization whose brands include established, decades-old group-tour companies like Contiki Tours and Trafalgar Travel. “I don’t think a lot of tour companies were really comfortable with having Black people represent their brands,” Mr. Much of that work has included training white Americans to tell the stories of Black America. He’s spent decades helping tourists understand America’s Black history. Burnette, who is Black, has spent more than 40 years in the Deep South, where he is the founder of a youth nonprofit, the Media Arts Institute of Alabama. More than a year later, those seeds are sprouting. Some group tour providers, too, made a pledge toward equity through training programs and funding for minority tour guides, and began planting seeds to get there. After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, the greater travel industry considered its troubled history of race and inclusivity, announcing new support for Black-owned businesses, diversity and inclusion initiatives, and calling for attention to alternative narratives. The group tour industry is overwhelmingly white - one study from the career site Zippia estimates fewer than 8 percent of guides working with organized tours are Black or African American - and the lack of representation can be seen in marketing materials, leadership boards and training staff. In late 2020, Leon Burnette, an independent tour director and civil rights historian, received a phone call from the director of a global travel company, asking him to recommend Black tour guides for a new tour being created along the United States Civil Rights Trail, which snakes from Kansas to Washington, D.C.
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