Although travelers who are part of the LGBTQ community have gained acceptance from destinations and hospitality companies in recent years, they still face unique challenges when it comes to planning trips.
Is where they’re traveling welcoming? Is it safe? What are the local laws?
The questions might compound depending on the individual or group, which in the case of families traveling with LGBTQ members includes: Is it family-friendly?
According to Billy Kolber, founder of LGBTQ training and education service HospitableMe, when it comes to planning a vacation, “family trumps LGBTQ.”
"For LGBTQ parents, their first decisions around travel - where they're going to go, where they're going to stay, what they're going to do - is driven by their kids and what the kids want to do,” he says.
“The second consideration is, is the destination or hotel or experience welcoming and friendly for my family? This is both relevant for gay and lesbian couples with kids, and it's also relevant for heterosexual, cisgender couples with queer kids and particularly gender-nonconforming or gender-nonbinary kids."
Finding this information for LGBTQ families isn’t always as simple as going to Tripadvisor and reading reviews. Rather, they’re turning to recommendations from friends and family or LGBTQ-dedicated travel blogs and influencers.
And while these are useful resources, there are opportunities for destinations and suppliers to indicate they’re welcoming to LGBTQ travelers and families, as well as to ensure an inclusive experience onsite.
Marketing hits and misses
Jon Bailey, founder of LGBTQ family travel blog 2 Dads With Baggage, says in recent years he’s noticed travel brands becoming more inclusive in not just targeted marketing and outreach to the LGBTQ community, but also in their mainstream communications to help “normalize” the idea of same-sex couples and LGBTQ families.
Still, not all destinations and brands have inclusive messaging, and some don’t provide any information at all about whether they’re LGBTQ-friendly.
Bailey points to Savannah, Georgia, as an example of a destination where he found “zero” information about if the area would be welcoming to his family. Meanwhile, he says the tourism boards of cities like New York, Las Vegas and San Diego all have dedicated sections on their websites for the queer community.
We realized that most people in hospitality have never had a professional conversation about who LGBTQ people are.
Billy Kolber - HospitableMe
"Even if [destinations or brands] just buy the search terms so that they show up in my search, I would go there before I would go to some random civil rights website” to find relevant information, he says.
"They're all in competition with one another for our choice for a vacation or visit, so you'd think they would do everything in their power to play it up. Why not? If I found that it was easy and comfortable, I would certainly choose that over a place that had zero information."
Indeed, according to Community Marketing & Insights' 2019 LGBTQ Tourism & Hospitality Survey, LGBTQ travelers took 3.1 vacation or leisure trips over the previous 12 months, and 80% said they would not travel to a destination that treats its local LGBTQ community poorly.
Additionally, 69% of travelers said they tend to stay at hotels they know are LGBTQ-welcoming, and the majority of travelers said it’s important to know whether a hotel or brand has sexual orientation non-discrimination policies or provides LGBTQ diversity training to staff.
"[Brands] have spent the last century marketing and establishing their brands to the mainstream public, so why would you not try to reach a new audience, recognizing that the old audience isn't going away? You're adding on top of it; it's not instead of.
“I tell brands ... you have nothing to lose and everything to gain."
Booking.com's bet
Booking.com is one major travel brand committed to making the travel experience more inclusive and welcoming for LGBTQ travelers and families through its soon-to-launch Travel Proud program.
The initiative came about a few months ago as the Norwalk, Connecticut-based online travel agency was researching another project and discovered that one in three members of the LGBTQ community fears judgement from hotel staff. “We thought to ourselves, that is a huge portion of the global population that doesn’t feel like they can show up as themselves when they travel,” a company spokesperson says.
In response, Booking.com developed Travel Proud, which allows its accommodation partners to become Proud Certified through a 75-minute online Proud Hospitality training session developed in partnership with HospitableMe.
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The company says the goal of the training is to help people see things from a different perspective and to provide practical skills and techniques that partners can immediately put into practice.
Partners who complete the course will be recognized with a Proud Certified badge – a rainbow suitcase – on their Booking.com listings. The training is free of charge and includes additional resources, such as a Travel Proud Customer Toolkit, which outlines additional steps to make LGBTQ travelers feel welcomed.
A soft launch of the pilot version of Travel Proud will roll out over the next few weeks with accommodation partners in Amsterdam, Berlin and Manchester.
Best practices
HospitableMe’s Kolber believes staff training is a critical component for travel brands looking to become more inclusive.
"A lot of brands started saying, 'We're LGBTQ-friendly,' without even knowing who the T and Q are, let alone how to be more welcoming," he says.
"We realized that most people in hospitality have never had a professional conversation about who LGBTQ people are and how to make the travel experience more inclusive and welcoming."
Why would you not try to reach a new audience, recognizing that the old audience isn't going away?
Jon Bailey - 2 Dads With Baggage
For LGBTQ families, HospitableMe has worked with companies such as The Travel Corporation (TTC) to help its brands understand best practices - or as Kolber calls them, emerging practices, as they evolve as society grapples with complicated issues - when talking to kids who might not look like traditional boys or girls, for example.
Kolber says the goal is to help staff understand issues families and their kids are facing and "focus on respecting them and be comfortable asking the questions you need to ask in order to understand how to treat them equally and with the same level of care and kindness you treat everybody else."
Kristian Anderson, executive vice president of global sales at TTC-owned Uniworld Boutique River Cruises, underwent HospitableMe’s LGBTQ sensitivity training and says it has helped the brand stand out to consumers in the river cruise market.
“Every single one of our employees, from the operational side to sales and reservations and marketing all participated … [and learned] how to pay attention to and respect and understand the nuances of the LGBTQ audience.”
Kolber says the biggest challenge for travel companies is finding the budget to invest in training, but Anderson believes it doesn’t have to be a “drain” on resources. “It doesn’t take additional funding or effort; it takes paying attention and listening. It starts with the conversation.”
Kolber says the percentage of destination and property brands actively engaged in the market is "very small" compared to the opportunity it presents, which includes loyalty, as families will often return or recommend their experience to other families.
"One of the reasons our market is known for being so brand loyal and so influential is that we really depend on the recommendations of our friends, our influencers and our media.”
Travel brands need to remember that "treating everybody the same is not the same as treating everybody equally,” he continues.
"Sometimes you need to treat people a little bit differently in order to provide them an equal experience."