Skift Global Forum 2015: The Growing Global Community of Black Travelers

Zim Ugochukwu, Founder of Travel Noire, will speak at the Skift Global Forum on October 14 and 15 in Brooklyn, New York on the growing global community of black travelers. See the complete list of speakers and topics for this year’s event. It's a bit of an understatement to say that the U.S. travel industry has challenges with diversity. The executive suites of airlines, destination marketing organizations, hotels, travel agencies, and cruise lines (with one exception, thanks to Carnival) are mostly male and almost exclusively white. While this presents problems on a social level, it is also a massive fail when it comes to business opportunities. Whether it's a monocultural team failing to create a decent marketing plan, or one failing to identify a broader suite of products to sell, there's lots of money being left on the table. Inching into that gap in recent years was been a group of younger, more vocal travelers of diverse backgrounds who are not only announcing that they're black and they travel, but finding ways to better educate brands about where opportunities may be. Travel Noire founder Zim Ugochukwu is one of the more entreprenurial of these voices. Travel Noire takes what it learns speaking to consumers and then turns around to speak with brands like Airbnb about how the brands can better comm