Tour Companies Aim to Boost Diversity Through Training and Funding - The New York Times
After the global reckoning over race in 2020, some group-tour providers made a pledge to improve equity through training, mentoring and funding for minority guides.
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. But there was a problem: Mr. Burnette hardly knew any.
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. 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. 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. More than a year later, those seeds are sprouting.
Mr. 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. He's spent decades helping tourists understand America's Black history. Much of that work has included training white Americans to tell the stories of Black America.
"I don't think a lot of tour companies were really comfortable with having Black people represent their brands," Mr. Burnette said. "They didn't want to offend people. It's changing now."
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. Mr. Launder and 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.
One of the biggest hurdles aspiring tour guides face, said Mr. 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. "We have to change the whole paradigm of how companies find, recruit, train, place and mentor people in this industry," he said.
Their first director training program, with 20 participants, was offered in various locations across the American South in December. Other training programs will launch in March and August.
"The Black Lives Matter movement was a huge wake-up call for us," Mr. Launder said. "Black people should tell Black history. Indigenous people should tell Indigenous history. We can control this, and the fact that we've already run our first training program is proof we can make it happen."
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. 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.
"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. "There are a lot of diversity initiatives out there, but this is something that has never existed in group travel until now."
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.
And 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. In February, the group traveled together to Antarctica, where they held sessions on marketing to, and investing in, Black travelers.
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. Black travelers in the United States spent nearly $130 billion on leisure travel, both domestic and international, in 2019. But Black travelers face unique challenges. The tourism marketing agency MMGY Global reports that concerns of both safety and representation weigh heavy on Black travelers.
"It's not that Black tour guides aren't there, they just aren't getting the recognition that they deserve," said Martinique Lewis, a diversity-in-travel consultant who serves as president of the Black Travel Alliance, a nonprofit launched in 2020 to hold travel brands accountable to their claims of diversity and inclusion (she is a member of Hurtigruten's advisory board, as well). "They're not the ones the travel publications put on their big list, and not the ones that destinations use when you go to their site. But there are multiple tours around the world that cater to a different narrative than one of the European background."
Tashieka Brewer, a publicist who lives in New Jersey, began aggregating many of those tours on a website, Pink Girls Run The World, after growing frustrated with her own group travel experiences, including hearing a fellow traveler on a plantation tour in New Orleans who questioned whether African Americans had actually been held as slaves. She also links to Airbnb postings, restaurants and hotels that have been recommended as welcoming to Black travelers, and blogs about her own travel experiences.
"Many Black Americans may feel intimidated to travel to some places when they don't see other people that look like them traveling there," she said. Her family has a long legacy of leading tours; she grew up watching her grandmother organize tours across the United States and to the Caribbean for her fellow Black female neighbors in the 1980s.
Meckell Milburn and Daviera Powell, who are Black, are cousins who also grew frustrated with the group tourism industry. They decided to start their own company, Budget & Bougie Travel, which will offer group tours, designed for women of color at multiple price points, starting in 2023.
"It's important that we're able to go into spaces and be our most authentic self," said Ms. Powell. "And sometimes, depending on the group you may be traveling with, you can't do that."
And for Rani Cheema, a Puerto Rican and Punjabi woman who runs small boutique culinary tours through Cheema's Travel, the pandemic's shift to virtual work in 2020 prompted a wake-up call.
"When all of our office meetings went virtual, I realized every presentation included a white family, wearing white, on a white sand beach. I never once saw myself in those images," she said. "That's when I realized why I never felt comfortable in the luxury travel world."
She has since pivoted her focus toward greater diversity, bringing on co-hosts for her trips who identify as people of color or those from the L.G.B.T.Q. community, including Cha McCoy for Galicia, Spain; Deuki Hong for South Korea and Keba Konte for Japan.
Many trainee tour guides say they're grateful for the education on how to lead groups. But as they now set out to tackle the job market, what's really made a difference is connections and newly opened doors.
"I did networking on my own, and could only find avenues into the hotel and restaurant side of the business," said Jazz Dottin, 32, a trainee in the Pathways Project who studied tourism and hospitality management at Temple University. She's currently interviewing for a position with the established tour operator EF Tours, an opportunity she says that Pathways and TripSchool helped initiate.
"One thing they emphasized in the program is that the tourism and hospitality field is all about who you know," she said. "They helped us gain the networking skills to be able to get jobs."
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