dailynewsnblog
For most people, booking the right hotel stay comes down to a few simple factors: price, location and amenities. “Oh, this one includes free breakfast,” one might say to themselves, and voila, it’s booked.
For some communities, it’s not so simple. Until my father started traveling again after having his leg amputated, I never understood how difficult it is for travelers with physical disabilities to simply get into a room that’s functional and safe. It’s been eye-opening.
The LGBTQ+ community is also one that frequently finds it difficult to pick a hotel that meets their specific set of needs, including something as serious as safety or as human as accepting their gender identity and making them feel welcome during check-in. As a gay man, I’ve experienced my own version of this while having to explain that I booked a king-size bed because I’m traveling with my husband. “No,” I’ve insisted, “we don’t need two beds.”
In fact, a new survey from Booking.com revealed that only 31% of LGBTQ+ travelers globally say they are “out” when they travel. Worse yet, 44% of LGBTQ+ travelers also say that they are taking more precautions than they were a few years ago, the survey reported.
But what do you do about it? For Booking.com, the answer is education, through a free program offered to hotels called Travel Proud, designed to “help hoteliers and accommodation providers see things from a different perspective and provide some practical skills and techniques that partners can immediately put into practice to help contribute to guests encountering a more inclusive experience.”
Related: Coming out through travel: learning to love myself one trip at a time
The free online training takes 90 minutes, is offered in 11 languages and was created in partnership with HospitableMe, a global leader in inclusive hospitality education. Once the training is complete, the hotel is equipped with a Travel Proud Customer Toolkit for guest-facing staff to help put into action what they’ve learned.
The hotel also receives a dedicated Travel Proud badge on Booking.com, which shows potential guests that it has completed the training. On the website, LGBTQ+ travelers and allies can even use the “Travel Proud (LGBTQ+ friendly)” filter while searching to see what hotels in their destination are accredited.
The program started after outside research found that a significant number of LGBTQ+ travelers feared judgment from hotel staff, Kristofer Barber, Booking.com’s director of global communications, told me during a visit to the company’s Amsterdam headquarters during World Pride.
Reward your inbox with the TPG Daily newsletter
Join over 700,000 readers for breaking news, in-depth guides and exclusive deals from TPG’s experts
“It kind of kept resurfacing in conversations we were having,” Barber said. “At a certain point, we were like, ‘Is there a friction point here?'”
From there, the company dug deeper to understand what those moments of friction actually looked like. Its research examined everything from travelers’ anxiety around the hotel check-in process to how staff could avoid making assumptions about guests.
One example, Barber said, was ensuring hotel staff could confirm a guest’s bed preference “without making them feel like they’re doing something wrong” — without realizing he’d just described a subtle friction point I’d experienced myself while traveling with my husband.
But the research uncovered more than awkward conversations about room configurations. It found that travelers’ anxiety can vary based on everything from their gender identity and gender expression to who they’re traveling with, particularly during moments as routine as checking into a hotel.
“We can’t fix it. We don’t control what happens,” Barber said. “How can we influence better experiences for travelers?”
After all that research, Travel Proud and its partner- and customer-facing tools boil down into three distinct areas: helping LGBTQ+ people choose with confidence, helping accommodation partners be extra welcoming and using inclusive language on the Booking.com platform.
Now, Travel Proud has been adopted by more than 150,000 properties across 163 countries and 20,000 cities. For LGBTQ+ travelers, that’s 150,000 more places working to remove moments of friction so guests can spend less time worrying about how they’ll be received and more time enjoying why they traveled in the first place.
Related reading:
