Interview - CassiusLife & Black & Abroad
Black & Abroad Talk the Importance of Black Luxury Travel By Alex Zephyr
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lack & Abroad is the Atlanta-based brainchild of Kent Johnson and Eric Martin. Founded in April 2015, the two men identified a need for travel companies to cater to the needs of Black people but also to democratize the luxury experience and for Black people “to tap into a sense of pride when doing so.” So they bootstrapped the company and have grown their enterprise to include more than 100 countries and across every continent, making it a point to partner with Black-owned businesses in those locations, too. Johnson and Martin have been invited to the United Nations, companies like Mastercard and Facebook, and other organizations around the world to discuss the need for authentic and organic representation of the Black community in media. Two years after their wildly successful “Go Back to Africa” campaign, Black & Abroad released “The Black Elevation Map” this past February. The tool assists Black domestic travelers with 12 curated city guides and 10 national guides to learn about everything ranging from Black-owned wineries (“Melanin Vines”) to notable start-up companies (“Black Silicon Valley”) to restaurants that fueled the Civil Rights Movement (“Civil Bites”). Johnson and Martin sat with CASSIUSLife to talk about the pandemic’s effect on travel altogether, normalizing the ideas of Black excellence and the future of Black luxury travel for 2022. CASSIUSLife: What inspired the development of the Black Elevation Map, and how does a traveler use it to enhance the experience? Eric Martin: Back in 2020, when the pandemic was at an all-time high, we obviously weren’t able to travel. Nobody knew anything about the virus at the time, so we were all on lockdown. A
McKinsey study came out around that time that [highlighted the disproportionate percentage] of Black businesses, including brick-and-mortar, that had to close their doors as a result. Nearly half of small Black businesses were shutting their doors, and we were one of them. But luckily, we didn’t have a brick-and-mortar; we were able to operate digitally. So we asked, “How can we use the theme of travel to help solve the problem — maybe not in its entirety — but at least set up some type of “train track” for recovery to follow? And so we came up with the Black Elevation Map. We said that we were going to use Google and Yelp because, around that time, you were able to self-identify as a Black-owned business. So we [used them] as a source for all of the Blackowned businesses here in the U.S., and to not only encourage domestic travel but also encourage patronage to a lot of our Black landmarks as well, like museums, historic sites, restaurants, things of that nature. So there are over 30,000 businesses on the map, black businesses on the map. But we also wanted to include places that were sacred to us, that we can just go and explore. It promotes travel by allowing our people to see the heights of our culture. And it also allows our people to go and create and curate their own itineraries that they can use to share some of their favorite places, not only for themselves but with their friends and family. So this is a project designed to try to allow us to experience our own businesses in a way that has never been done before. CASSIUSLife: What is the importance of Black people embracing the idea of luxury travel, both domestically and internationally?
38 | ABA Publications | Africa TRAVEL | May 2022
