Decolonizing Travel (Part 1 of Many)

By Harry Alvarez | November 21, 2021

“A Latino kid from the Bronx? He’s not our typical candidate”. That’s how my career in travel started. Thankfully the other person in that conversation had the courage to say “isn’t that a good thing?”

More often than not the conversation goes differently, and we end up hiring those we’re comfortable with. Those in our network. The people we went to college with. The person your old college buddy went to grad school with, or the son of the football coach. The people that just happen to look, talk, and act just like us. It’s normal. We all have a certain level of narcissism that makes us think that we are greatness. So, more of us is good. This is an incredibly hard habit to break. And one that fifteen years into my career I've experienced first hand. 

Most travel conferences, study abroad fairs, gap year fairs, risk management conferences etc are dominated by a monolith of voices all coming from one culture. Yet these same venues are trying to engage with communities all over the world and represent those cultures. In order to do this appropriately we need more voices in the room that are from these places, represent its culture, and look like the folks there. As Lin Manuel Miranda says in Hamilton we need to be “in the room where it happens”.

Who better to guide a group of tourists in the Dominican Republic than a Dominican-American. Who better to explain the horrors of the Khmer Rouge than the grandson of someone who was a victim to the genocide, and who better to teach us the rhythms of Ghana than a native daughter. We value these experiences so much, but are we doing the work necessary to assure that those folks that are key components of our programming have a voice in its design, implementation, and management, let alone the economic benefits of its profits? When we do so we will truly take the first step toward decolonizing travel.