As long-simmering racial tensions have come to a head around the globe in recent weeks, travel brands are starting to reckon with the inequalities that exist within the industry and how they can be a part of the solution.
Initiatives such as the Black Travel Alliance’s #PullUpForTravel campaign, for example, are calling for travel companies to release their diversity metrics in areas including employment, conferences and trade shows, as well as paid advertising and marketing campaigns, in an effort to foster transparency and accountability.
On the marketing front, brands such as Intrepid Travel are pledging to amplify the voices of Black, indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) in their marketing, including through influencer campaigns, which Mikey Sadowski, marketing director of Intrepid Group North America, says have historically been built on “vanity metrics.”
"Traditionally, in the early days, influencer marketing was a stereotypical beautiful person in a beautiful beach bikini. Frankly, it wasn't representative of travelers,” he says. "The travel industry at its core is so diverse, and it's built on breaking cultural barriers.
“How we got to where we are today, I think, was rooted in a very unhealthy influencer marketing industry that now has a really big opportunity to grow up a little bit.”
Unfair playing field
Understanding just how deep racial disparities run in travel influencer marketing is part of the problem, says Justine Abigail Yu, PR and communications manager at travel community Wanderful.
“There’s a dearth of info and data because we're not collecting this race-based data on travel influencer marketing,” she says. “It’s mostly anecdotal for now, even though we can clearly see which demographics dominate the top travel influencers in the space.”
Part of the reason influencers in marketing campaigns tend to skew white is because there are few Black or people of color consulting on the media plans, says Barbara Burnett, head of brand partnerships at digital marketing and influencer agency Black Girl Digital.
For Black influencers, it's a constant fight to get paid equitably and to get the same caliber of partnerships.
Oneika Raymond
“Typically, the media planners and buyers at the agencies are white and don’t know any Black influencers outside of celebrities, so it may be challenging for them to include Black micro-influencers on a plan,” she says.
Whenever one or two “token” Black influencers are selected, she continues, agencies tend to “give them ‘test’ budgets to ‘see’ if they work out. This has to stop.”
Oneika Raymond, who has blogged as Oneika the Traveller since 2005 and who works with brands including Delta Air Lines, Visit New Orleans and Alamo Rent A Car, says that in the travel influencer space, "it's a constant fight to get paid equitably and to get the same caliber of partnerships," noting it has taken her years of work to get to the level where businesses seek her out directly.
Still, there are times when brands try to stiff her on compensation: A tech company, for example, last year claimed it had no budget to pay her for a campaign beyond travel and expenses, while a non-Black peer was offered money for the exact same deliverables. (Raymond ultimately declined the offer.)
"It was very much a slap in the face," she says of the experience. "It reminded me that the playing field is far from equal."
Evita Robinson, founder of Nomadness Travel Tribe, says another reason Black travel influencers are typically paid less than their white counterparts is because Black influencers often have to go through “middlemen” - or agencies - to get work, rather than dealing with brands directly.
“Why would you have the middleman when [Black influencers] are established in our community? We’re respected. We have the numbers and can back up the content, and now we’re being hired at a much, much lower cost because there’s already been a third party dipped into the budget.”
No excuses
For travel marketers to find a diverse slate of influencer candidates, Raymond says they don’t need to go far, or necessarily spend any money: "I always say, 'You do not need a Ph.D to graduate from Google University.’"
In other words, start with a search.
"The Information Superhighway is chock-full of valuable information," she says. "Black travel hosts, Black travel media, Black travel writers will pop up because we, as Black people, are creating these lists [of resources].
“We are getting them to rank in Google for these exact search terms so [marketers] will no longer have the excuse they cannot find us, because it's categorically untrue."
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Sadowski says that at Intrepid Travel, he acknowledges there is a diversity of perspectives and narratives in travel across race, gender, age, ability and geography, and working with influencers should be about making personal relationships and ensuring there's shared value in the work being created.
"It's not about checkbox diversity. That's not healthy,” he says.
Inclusivity, he says, comes from forming long-term relationships with the influencer community - not one-and-done campaigns - and those relationships "require a higher touch point with the brand itself.”
Ensuring that influencers are being compensated fairly comes down to "open and honest conversations about the actual results that you're trying to deliver," Sadowski says, be that brand awareness, clicks to a website or bookings.
"It's really about taking an individualized approach, not trying to do this one-size-fits-all type of thing," he continues. "People feeling like they're misrepresented, or not being compensated accordingly, I think is probably the symptom of saying, 'OK, these are the rates and that's what we do.'"
Jade Broadus, vice president and creative director at Travel Mindset, which partners with Black Girl Digital, says that the influencers themselves should have a lot of say into the deliverables of each campaign. “They do know their audience best,” she says, adding that agencies such as Travel Mindset exist in part to help facilitate those conversations.
Raymond says that in her role as a veteran influencer, she's in a position to speak out more about racial inequality in the industry than those just starting out, but it's still a fine line to walk. "I'm aware of how [speaking out] could potentially harm my future career prospects or the prospects of others."
She says a lot of brands – after posting black squares in support of the Black Lives Matter movement on Instagram - are paying lip service at the moment, but the "true test will be to see what they're doing six months from now, a year from now."
As travel marketers look to the future, Sadowski says, "We shouldn't be aspiring for things to go back to normal. We should redefine what normal means."
For influencer marketing, "Let's focus on actually building a very quality and healthy influencer marketing industry and not one built on quantity, not one built on vanity metrics, the likes or followers," he says.
“The influencer marketing industry went astray because of the focus on quantity, and right now we have to bring it back to quality, and within that quality you build around the pillars of inclusivity and shared value.”
* Correction: This post has updated Justine Abigail Yu's name