Travel + Leisure's Diversity and Inclusion Pledge Travel, at its core, is about learning from cultures around the world. We have a responsibility to ensure that respectful curiosity is reflected across our brand. That means carefully considering every article we publish online and in the magazine — and finding the right people to report on and edit those stories. It also means examining what we’ve published in the past, detailing what we’re doing today, and being transparent about how we plan to evolve. On this page, you'll find a snapshot of our staff, contributors, content, and initiatives. Everything here is backed by numbers — some that we’re proud of, others that we’re not. As we continue to grow, we hope to improve upon these efforts and keep you updated every step of the way. Our People We strongly believe in hiring a diverse range of creators to contribute to Travel + Leisure’s website, magazine, and social channels — including photographers, illustrators, writers, and influencers. We are continuously working to expand our BIPOC writer base and create opportunities (from press trips to special projects) for those contributors. As of June 30, 2022, our full-time staff of 41 people was 20% BIPOC and 80% white. In Q2 2022, we sent a Dotdash Meredith demographics survey to our print and digital contributors, including writers, designers, photographers, and social media content creators. As of now, we are not able to share the data because less than 50% of our contributors have completed the survey. Our intent is to continue following up with our contributor base and to report our findings in the coming quarters. Here’s how we plan to evolve: We want to prioritize diversity as full-time positions and opportunities for backfilling roles become available — and ensure that we are increasing our BIPOC contributor base for the website and the magazine each month. In the meantime, we are working with Dotdash Meredith’s People Team to find seminars on diverse hiring practices that we can attend as a team. Update at the end of 2022: At the end of 2022, our full-time staff of 51 (across print, digital, and commerce) was 20% BIPOC, 80% white. Of the 11 new hires in 2022, 36% are BIPOC, 64% are white.35% of our contributors across print, digital, and social have responded to our demographics survey in the final quarter of 2022. Of those respondents, 38% identified as BIPOC.81% of our Travel Advisory Board members have responded to our demographics survey. Of those respondents, 41% identified as BIPOC. 2023 Goals: We will ensure our contributor base — on the website, in the magazine, and on our social channels — is 40% BIPOC by the end of 2023.We will interview multiple BIPOC or LGBTQ-identifying candidates for every open full-time role. We will find a seminar the T+L editorial team can attend on diverse hiring practices and bringing on new BIPOC writers. Our Content We pledge to cover BIPOC communities around the world through thoughtful reporting. So much of our coverage offers recommendations for where to go, what to see, and what to do, and we want to make sure we appropriately represent the destinations we spotlight. That requires not only including diverse neighborhoods and BIPOC-owned businesses, but also finding diverse sources, contributors, and Travel Advisory Board members to broaden our perspective and ultimately enrich our reporting. Further, we are collaborating with Dotdash Meredith’s Anti-bias Review Board to audit 400 of the most popular stories published on T+L’s website in 2021. The goal is to identify any problematic language and update our articles accordingly, as well as use our takeaways from the audit to shift our editorial practices and avoid repeating past mistakes. Update at the end of 2022: We published 62 articles on our Better Together vertical, spotlighting diverse and under-told stories in 2022.We audited 400 top-performing articles in 2021 with Dotdash Meredith’s Anti-bias Review Board. Following the receipt of this feedback, we made changes to both the print and digital style guides. The print magazine made significant anti-bias changes to their style guide in 2020, which have now been integrated into the digital style guide. 2023 Goals: We will educate our entire staff on the changes to our style guides and to ensure that our language across the site and social channels follows the new guidelines shaped by our learnings from the Anti-bias Review Board.We will put remediation projects into action to remove bias language. Our first goal is removing the word “exotic” from 210 articles by the end of Q1.At least one article in each section of the print magazine will cover a BIPOC-owned or -centered business or organization, or contribute meaningfully on the topic of diversity in travel. At least 10% of our digital articles will cover a BIPOC-owned or -centered business or organization, or contribute meaningfully on the topic of diversity in travel. At least 10% of our Instagram headline cards, which feed a significant amount of social traffic to the website, will direct to these stories. Our Community Our goal is to work with a number of organizations across this industry that celebrate and advocate for diversity in travel and editorial. This summer, print and digital staffers are working with Girls Write Now to mentor young creatives from low-income neighborhoods in the U.S. We’re also committed to finding an organization rooted in equitable travel to partner with long term. Finally, we pledge to ensure that, when we appear on industry panels, the segments we participate in reflect a wide variety of experiences and backgrounds. We will update this pledge with our progress, to hold ourselves accountable, and intend to publish the next update at the end of 2022. Update at the end of 2022: Print and digital staffers partnered with organization Girls Write Now in August, working 1:1 with young creatives on their college essays, and with Los Angeles-based community organization Safe Place for Youth in December. Our editor-in-chief appeared at Nomadness Fest in September, a three-day event bringing BIPOC travelers together. 2023 Goals: We will meet as an editorial team to find an equitable travel organization to work with in the coming year.Upon being invited to participate on any panel in 2023, we will ask about the makeup on the panel and advocate for diversity by recommending panelists or declining invitations should panels prove to not be inclusive. Update at the end of 2023: The world we live in is constantly evolving, and so is Travel + Leisure. Throughout 2023, our team remained dedicated to achieving the goals we set in our Diversity and Inclusion Pledge across our website, social channels, magazine, and commerce business. This commitment influenced the topics we covered and the people we hired to cover them; the products, businesses, and places we promoted across our platforms; and the lens through which we updated existing content, among other aspects of our operations. In 2023, we set a goal to ensure that 10 percent of the new articles published on travelandleisure.com included BIPOC-owned businesses and/or diverse central themes including BIPOC-driven travel, LGBTQ+ inclusive travel, destinations where the majority of population is not white, and sustainability-minded travel. We also set out to have at least one article follow these parameters in each section of the print magazine. That goal was accomplished in the magazine every month of 2023, and on digital, we raised our numbers significantly: from 4 percent of our new articles in Q1 2023 to 11 percent in Q2, 10.6 percent in Q3, and 7.2 percent in Q4. In 2023, our team also removed bias language from 188 URLs, eliminating the word "exotic" from stories. We will continue to remediate content with problematic verbiage in 2024. In our hospitality coverage, we took a closer look at how we could become the arbiters of change in the hotel space, helping push the travel industry in a more inclusive direction. We made a point to ask every hotel our staff and reporters visited (approximately 150 new hotels in 2023) about their accessibility offerings — and added a section on accessibility and sustainability to our new hotel reviews. Accessibility and sustainability are also now a crucial part of our hotel values. Further, for the first time, in 2024, printed the number of best new It List hotels that offer ADA-compliant rooms to travelers. In our evergreen commerce content, we surpassed our goal of having at least 10% of our roundups published each month feature one or more products from BIPOC/LGBTQ-owned brands. While doing this, we also expanded our list of brand partners to include and track new BIPOC/LGBTQ-owned brands, creating a growing resource for our editors to use in future assignments. In product testing, we also kept diverse body types, race, accessibility needs, and age top of mind. On social, about 5% of our 2023 Instagram headline cards, which feed a significant amount of social traffic to the website, directed to an article contributing meaningfully on the topic of diversity in travel. In 2024, we plan to have at least 10% of our Instagram headline cards drive to these stories. In 2023, we also published about one Reel each month highlighting a BIPOC-owned restaurant or business, or driving conversation around diversity. Of our short-form video contributors, who are brand personalities across our social channels, 55% are BIPOC. We interviewed multiple BIPOC or LGBTQ-identifying candidates for every open full-time role in 2023, and meaningfully added professionals with new perspectives to our team. We sent staffers to Nomadness Fest, ColorComm, and the International Indigenous Tourism Conference in 2023 as part of our ongoing education and active networking with content creators of all backgrounds. Our editors appeared on many panels that were at least 40% diverse or featured notable female representation, including at ILTM, World Economic Forum, Cruise Summit, and Sea Trade. We also continued to update our print and digital style guides to ensure that the language used across our channels is inclusive and follows current guidelines and learnings. Our pledge to continue to broaden our editorial perspective, add BIPOC contributors to our team, and remain open-minded to new stories and voices will continue into 2024 and beyond.