Visit Baltimore CEO: Let’s Have the Race Conversation and Change Tourism Once and for All
Photo Credit: Alisa Brock, the owner of Drama MaMa Bookshop in Baltimore where she creates custom laser cut journals and hosts workshops to share her wisdom and binding techniques. Photo courtesy Visit Baltimore. Visit Baltimore
Skift Take
Lots of urgent changes are needed in travel, and nothing more urgent than making it racially diverse. As an industry, we have fallen short, and tourism needs to reflect the diversity of the world of travelers it serves.
What are the intersections of travel with institutional inequities in America, and how do they manifest through race? A call for change has started in travel, reflective of every other business and societal sector where these discussions and calls for change are happening. And after I read a LinkedIn post from Visit Baltimore CEO Al Hutchinson, in which he talks briefly but resonantly on his personal experience with racism and "how the travel and hospitality industry and our community can be part of the change we wish to see in the world," I reached out to him to expand on this.
His city of Baltimore, with a more than 60 percent black population, has gone through so much in its history, including 2015's death of Freddie Gray in police custody and the unrest that followed in the city, and Twitter attacks from our current president. Yet, it was on the cusp of a tourism reinvention under Hutchinson's leadership, with a new brand and a Super Bowl ad, a rare commercial from a smaller tou
