Diversity, equity & inclusion

All together now

Leaders from different corners of the travel industry share their views, insights and advice on diversity, equity and inclusion

NICHOLAS NELSON

EY GLOBAL LODGINGS AND EMEIA DEVELOPED MARKETS TRAVEL M&E LEADER Fuelled by increased demand from clients, there are plans to grow headcount across EY and to do that we know we must make ourselves the employer of choice and DE&I is a major part of that. We fully recognise that it is critical for the organisation to live and breathe the values that its people live and breathe in their own lives.

From a supply chain perspective, it’s important to make sure we are bringing the industry's best into our programme, including a range of diverse suppliers, whether that’s businesses which are women-owned, LGBTQ+ owned, or veteranowned, as examples. It’s about making sure we see and welcome the best innovations.

One of the priorities for supply chain services is to make sure we are accessible to these diverse suppliers and to make it as easy and smooth for them to engage with us and be considered for our travel and M&E programs. We have been working with our Environmental Social Governance Services team to develop an intake process that makes it as easy as possible for a diverse supplier to find their way to us.

We hold pitch forums where we invite potential suppliers to showcase their products and services, which work well. It’s a great way to discuss ideas and to see what’s out there in the marketplace, but we are always careful to make sure the suppliers understand that it might not turn into an opportunity.

Some of these businesses might be small in comparison to our larger suppliers, so we recognise we need to find an effective way of plugging them into our programme. It’s imperative to make sure they get an equitable voice and don’t get swamped.

CAROLYN PEARSON

CEO MAIDEN-VOYAGE A generic approach to travel safety falls short of good practice when it comes to duty of

From a supply chain perspective, it’s important to make sure we are bringing the best of the industry into our programme, including a range of diverse suppliers”

care. Instead you need to personalise your travel risk management.

First off, poll your business travellers and take a temperature check. Dig deep, ask lots of open questions and collect diversity data. Keep responses anonymous to protect an individual’s privacy. Ideally you want to be looking for specifics related to gender, sexual orientation, health, disability, age, and race. Offer multiple-choice responses, nobody is one-dimensional. Engage with your Employee Resource Groups and diversity networks to learn about the people they represent and their unique travel needs or concerns. Consider running travel safety deep-dives and focus groups. Always adopt a ‘never about us without us’ approach, where you allow different minority groups to tell you what they need rather than speaking for them.

Audit current travel safety information resources. Source and share relevant content such as the ILGA map on state sponsored homophobia and a list of countries where the zika virus is prevalent. Make content widely available for all employees and ensure that it can be consumed anonymously.

Pre-travel risk assessments should be considered for all destinations and be a combination of generic risks such as hotel fire or road traffic accident as well as some personal elements. Even relatively safe and local destinations could be complex for certain demographics.

It’s not OK to ask employees about personal issues such as sexuality or health issues but you can ask two ‘magic' questions. Firstly, ask if a traveller is comfortable and feels able to take the trip. Secondly, ask what adjustments can be made to better support them on the trip. Make sure you provide a confidential ‘no justification, no travel policy’ which allows employees to decline a trip without having to justify their reasons why.

You should also provide pre-travel safety training that incorporates specific diversity elements for everybody and an easy posttravel feedback mechanism that goes much deeper than a basic travel survey. Educate or remove those suppliers from your travel programmes who don’t reflect your DE&I values or policies.

And then repeat! Make this a continuous loop of learning and improvement whilst capturing new employees as they join your organisation.

FRANK HARRISON

REGIONAL SECURITY DIRECTOR UK AND NORTH AMERICA, WORLD TRAVEL PROTECTION There is great debate over best-in-class approaches to addressing DEI in the workplace, especially when it comes to business travel. The old school approach was to target the individual traveller through self-declaration but today businesses and organisations that have developed a strong culture grounded in DEI have taken steps to facilitate a community of belonging.

Duty of Care encourages a framework where all travellers receive the same awareness and education before travel approval. By providing universality of information through awareness and education programmes, everyone has the same risk threshold and understanding, without prejudice or fear of losing personal privacy, reinforcing acceptance.

When an organisation requires employees to travel internationally, travel approvers might unknowingly expose travellers to unsafe situations or environments that may be hostile or uncomfortable to them. As identified by Human Dignity Trust, 11 countries maintain the death penalty, and 71 countries still criminalise gender and sexual orientation.

An organisation must understand their travellers; the destination, including local laws and customs; and the activity to be conducted. They must provide honest, 

 non-biased trip advice that is uniform to all travellers. If a traveller has concerns around DE&I, there must be resources available to answer concerns, give advice, or allow the traveller to speak with an unbiased third-party travel risk provider whose focus is the safe, successful fulfilment of the anticipated journey.

By ensuring all employees receive the same information, they can pack the proper knowledge for travel regardless of their person risk profile.

LINDA BEKOE

CEO OF APLBC AND FOUNDER OF BEKOE.COM Think of luxury or business travel and instantly you think of images featuring traditionally European, white, mainly middle-class travellers. But as travel is thankfully coming back, and as DE&I now has a much more prominent voice, many ethnically diverse travellers who’ve felt neglected and even excluded are looking for business travel or luxury experiences that fulfil their needs.

This is a huge opportunity for our sector that we all need to respond to. Change is needed and brands must take the lead in demonstrating how important inclusivity is to them. If they don’t, they’ll be left behind and their business will suffer.

We’re already seeing new competitors entering the market that are catering specifically for black or ethnic minority travellers seeking refined, personalised experiences.

For established companies, it’s not enough to rely on existing customers. If you want growth you need to attract new customers. And that means diversifying your reach.

But why have black or minority ethnic travellers felt neglected or excluded up to this point, and why have these new businesses emerged?

One significant reason is representation in advertising, and how luxury or business travel is portrayed. If someone of colour is to feel welcomed and included, they need to feel represented and see themselves reflected back at them.

But few companies within the luxury or business travel are actively speaking to black or ethnic minority audiences through their advertising.

Businesses need to address this issue and demonstrate their DE&I credentials by visibly promoting greater diversity. When they do that, they’ll become more appealing to a much broader demographic.

And they need to do it now, when the world is opening up again. Because if they don’t, black and ethnic minority travellers will look elsewhere, to the new businesses entering the market. And they’ll be lost as a customer that helps deliver your growth.

CAROL FERGUS

DIRECTOR GLOBAL TRAVEL, MEETINGS AND GROUND TRANSPORTATION FIDELITY INTERNATIONAL DE&I is something very close to my heart and earlier this year, at the GBTA Conference, I set out a challenge to the industry. I would like to see everyone – whether that’s corporate buyers, suppliers, TMCs or anyone else in the business travel ecosystem – to hire at least one person from an underrepresented group to diversify their workforce. That might be someone from an ethnic minority, or from the LGBTQ+ community, someone with a disability, or a Mum returning to work.

My dream is to see 100 companies adopt the apprenticeship scheme I developed internally for Fidelity International and implemented in collaboration with my TMC and other third party providers.

The scheme provides education, training and learning – both on the job and in a classroom or virtually – and supports the apprentice by meeting their career aspirations, providing visibility and helping to identify future career opportunities.

The scheme also supports the apprentice via sponsorship, mentoring and networking to help build their confidence and improve their people skills.

I’ve called it the 100 Challenge and it’s already grabbed the attention of a number of companies. It’s a simple process but I believe it will make a big difference to the industry and its future.

PHIL WOOSTER

VICE PRESIDENT AND HEAD OF SALES EMEA AT CWT A robust DE&I program is an imperative for engendering successful teams and positive corporate cultures. According to data from consulting firm McKinsey & Company, there is an undeniable link between diversity and financial success for all types of businesses. So, creating an environment that is inclusive to employees of all backgrounds and genders is no longer a nice-to-have, it’s a critical business driver to succeeding financially for years to come.

Companies where employees feel welcome, where success is celebrated and attainable for all, irrespective of gender, religion, sexual orientation, or race, enables deeper trust and more commitment from employees as everyone brings their true self to the workplace.

Clarifying and prioritising your organisation’s inclusivity stance is, in my view, the most impactful way for companies to attract and importantly retain brilliant and diverse talent. At CWT, our diversity commitment is ingrained into our operational DNA. Our 12,000 employees range in age from 18 to 90, we are physically present in over 140 countries and comprise 90 nationalities.

Beyond promoting inclusivity and transparency in our workplace, we strive to help our customers and their business travellers choose how they want their genders classified when booking. This gives a clear view of any disparities or possibly unrecognised biases in gender.

As an LGBTQ+ person on the CWT management team, spearheading CWT’s

Change is needed and brands must take the lead in demonstrating how important inclusivity is to them. If they don't, they'll get left behind and their businesses will su er”

LGBTQ+ Employee Resource Group, this level of commitment to diversity cements for me, and our global team, that incubating an inclusive workspace and culture is fundamental to how we monetise, build, grow, evolve and thrive.

THOMAS MAYNARD

HEAD OF SALES UK AND EUROPE VIRGIN ATLANTIC At Virgin Atlantic we live by our purpose, which is that everyone can take on the world. We’re focused on creating an inclusive environment where everyone feels a sense of belonging, an environment which values and respects people’s unique identities and fosters pride in being part of Virgin Atlantic, where our people, our customers, our partners and our communities are united, and minority groups are represented.

Our new campaign ‘See the world differently’ champions the individuality of our people and customers and draws on our heritage of challenging the status quo – as well as recognising that the travel industry is entering an exciting new era after the pandemic disruption.

We believe that no matter who you are or who you love, you should be able to travel anywhere. We have long supported LGBTQ+ rights both within our business and the numerous destinations we fly to. It’s something our founder Sir Richard Branson has championed since our inception 38 years ago.

Over the past two years we have been working with Open for Business to study the benefits of LGBTQ+ inclusion in 12 countries in CARICOM. Through this work, we’ve demonstrated that inclusion delivers huge benefit to both business and society, highlighting that anti-LGBTQ+ laws restrict tourism and economic growth, costing some Caribbean countries up to £4.2 billion a year, and that's not to mention the social impacts.

As the world opens up post-Covid, and many of our customers look forward reconnecting with colleagues and clients, or take a well-earned holiday, it’s more important than ever that we continue our work in ensuring the destinations we fly to are open for all. To support the economic recovery of the Caribbean, as well as the travel industry, we’re on a mission to support economic and social prosperity in the region though the advancement of LGBTQ+ rights and inclusivity to help attract the widest possible demographic of travellers, including those who identify as LGBTQ+ and their allies.

JOHN BUKOWSKI

VICE PRESIDENT, STRATEGIC SOURCING & CONTENT STRATEGY, AMEX GBT Amex GBT is a diverse company serving a global client base and it is vital that our supplier and vendor community reflect a broad spectrum of lives and experiences.

Progressive organisations have long been aware of the importance of diversity in supply chains but to some degree the pandemic has highlighted the need to address equality, as small businesses and marginalised communities were impacted the most.

Our supplier programme aims to support environmental, social, and economic progress in our supply chain ecosystem. We want to ensure we support diverse suppliers, along with those that prioritise diversity within their own companies. Within this strategy we have increased our target of utilising diverse suppliers across our sourcing portfolio, from 4% to 10% by 2030, and we continue to work with our supply base to progress environmental, social and economic causes.

We have re-vamped our supplier onboarding system to embed ESG within the entire process. We take the time to learn the story behind a business and understand how our suppliers are supporting environmental, social and economic causes. This process helps us align our supplier partners with our company values. We work to expand our diverse supplier footprint, along with working with industry-leading ESG companies such as Microsoft and others.

As part of our programme, we distribute our Supply Chain Values documentation to all partners an annual basis. These values include key priorities in a range of areas including human rights, equal employment opportunities and modern slavery.

Our supplier programme also supports and advises our customers on helping them achieve their goals, from diverse supplier spend targets to sustainability advisory services.

We will continue to lead our industry and work closely with our supplier partners to make true progress across environmental, social and economic priorities.