Former flight attendant and HR skilled Priscilla Adegoke unpacks the gaps in journey’s DEI progress—calling for a shift from company optics to actual, community-centred inclusion. Drawing on world experiences, she highlights how privilege, entry, and neglected voices form who actually advantages from tourism.
Just lately, at South by Southwest’s annual competition, I attended Intrepid Journey’s panel “DEI within the Time of Trump: How B Corps Are Navigating the Altering Panorama.” The panel explored how every of their corporations are navigating DEI commitments amid political backlash, significantly within the U.S. context. The timing wasn’t coincidental. As political rhetoric round DEI faces elevated scrutiny, journey firms are grappling with tips on how to preserve significant DEI commitments with out showing performative.
The dialogue sparked a realisation: whereas the journey trade has made strides in company DEI initiatives over the previous 5 years, we’ve barely scratched the floor of addressing the deeper inequities embedded in tourism itself.
Over the past 5 years, I’ve labored as a flight attendant for a flagship airline whereas touring extensively throughout Southeast Asia, the Center East, the Caribbean, Europe, and Africa. Mixed with my HR experience, this twin perspective has given me a front-row seat to witness how variety, fairness, and inclusion (DEI) in journey has developed, and the place it’s nonetheless falling brief.
From Company Gestures to Systemic Change
5 years in the past, DEI in journey meant rainbow logos throughout Pleasure Month and variety coaching. Immediately, we see extra substantive modifications— Airbnb’s anti-discrimination insurance policies, and Marriott’s dedication to doubling Black-owned enterprise spending by 2025 regardless of dealing with strain from the Trump administration’s insurance policies geared toward curbing DEI programmes. But latest GBTA (2024) knowledge confirmed solely 39% of journey trade executives are girls, with racial minorities faring worse.
Throughout the panel’s Q&A, Oliver Eitel posed a problem that left trade leaders speechless: would his daughter, who has Down syndrome, have significant profession alternatives of their organisations, or be relegated to the menial roles usually assumed appropriate for disabled folks? The silence revealed our elementary blind spot.
We regularly concentrate on whether or not disabled people will be employed inside our organisations, but overlook a extra urgent query: does our trade genuinely serve disabled travellers? When was the final time we audited our locations for wheelchair accessibility? Do our so-called ‘genuine experiences’ contemplate the wants of these with studying difficulties? Are we designing tourism that disabled folks can absolutely take part in—or are we merely hiring disabled workers to curate experiences they themselves won’t be capable of entry?
At 30,000 toes, I witnessed the true value of our trade’s negligence. Disabled passengers routinely dealing with delayed help or—worse—uncover their customized wheelchairs have been broken or misplaced fully. I’ve watched as passengers with dietary restrictions—whether or not spiritual, medical, or cultural—discover our ‘numerous’ menus woefully insufficient.
These aren’t remoted incidents; they’re predictable outcomes of techniques designed with out these communities in thoughts. If we are able to’t serve our passengers equitably, how are we treating the communities we go to?
The Neighborhood-Stage DEI Hole
Throughout Nigeria’s ‘Detty December’ celebrations, a diaspora homecoming that’s exploded over 5 years, I witnessed how even ‘cultural connection’ tourism can exclude the very folks it claims to have fun. These visiting navigated Lagos with personal drivers and police escorts whereas town’s infrastructure buckled underneath the strain.
The crowds have been overwhelmingly younger and able-bodied. The place have been the aged diaspora members who constructed these communities? The households with disabled kids who couldn’t entry the celebrations? Even this homecoming excluded sure our bodies and voices.
Extra problematically, the financial advantages hardly ever reached the communities most impacted by tourism’s prices. These with entry to capital, training, enterprise networks, and authorities contracts capitalise on the diaspora inflow, whereas others bore the burden of elevated residing prices and overwhelmed infrastructure.
The Privilege We Keep away from
Right here’s the uncomfortable reality the journey trade refuses to handle: diaspora tourism, like most types of worldwide journey, is basically about privilege. We’re all studying right here, and consciousness results in extra intentional journey—however we should acknowledge our shared complicity. These returning usually have considerably extra financial energy than residents, creating or exacerbating present inequalities.
I’ve visited nations, significantly these with colonial histories, which have develop into so depending on vacationer spending that native companies solely function when guests are current. Costs rise to match vacationer budgets, successfully pricing out the very communities that make these locations culturally wealthy. Nothing stays for locals to get pleasure from as a result of every little thing has been optimised for exterior consumption.
This sample of privileged mobility creating native displacement isn’t distinctive to Nigeria. I’ve noticed related patterns throughout Ghana, Kenya, and South Africa—a part of a broader world sample the place tourism improvement prices are distributed inequitably throughout completely different socioeconomic teams. The DEI frameworks we desperately want ought to study whether or not these prices are being shared pretty, however this dialog is constantly absent from trade discussions.
Recognising these patterns is so uncomfortable, nevertheless it’s additionally fairly liberating. As soon as we see how our present mannequin perpetuates inequality, we are able to begin constructing one thing completely different. When higher, you do higher.
The place Do We Go From Right here?
After years of watching each company DEI initiatives and tourism’s world growth, I’m satisfied we’d like a elementary reframing. Actual DEI in journey means recognising that I’m a visitor in another person’s dwelling and guaranteeing my presence contributes to, relatively than extracts from, native communities.
This requires tourism buildings that assure communities retain company over their assets and obtain equitable compensation after they share their tradition and atmosphere with guests. It means transferring past the query of whether or not our firms rent numerous workers to asking whether or not our total trade mannequin reinforces world inequalities.
The journey trade has confirmed it may drive significant change. Have a look at the legislative reforms round women-led excursions that firms like Intrepid have championed. As Cady Heron would say, “The restrict doesn’t exist.” We simply have to develop our imaginative and prescient of what DEI actually means.
The subsequent 5 years will decide whether or not the journey trade’s DEI evolution continues specializing in inside optics or lastly addresses the systemic inequities that tourism creates worldwide. Primarily based on what I’ve witnessed, we have now the instruments to decide on the latter—we simply want the braveness to make use of them.
To my journey trade leaders, your “genuine experiences” are solely genuine if the communities creating them can nonetheless afford to stay there. Earlier than advertising one other vacation spot, ask: Who earnings? Who pays? Who’s priced out?
Dearest Traveller, rainbow logos don’t equal revolution. Analysis operators with clear neighborhood partnerships and equitable revenue-sharing. Journey as a visitor, not a shopper. Pay native wages, store native companies, keep longer to scale back your carbon footprint. Each vacation spot picture in your feed might characterize a neighborhood displaced by tourism designed on your price range, not their profit.
To shut, I’ll go away you with a quote from Susan C. Allen Augustin at Right here We Flo: ‘If equality looks like oppression to the privileged, that’s an indication we’re doing one thing proper.’
