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Marginalized travelers have long turned to online communities to share travel tipsencouragement and good practices in the face of discrimination.
#AirbnbWhileBlack is an example. The hashtag that has been trending on social media since 2016, and through it, black travelers who face bias when booking vacation rentals have shared their experiences with racial bias among Airbnb hosts.
In response, a couple of digital nomads Jessica E. Boyd and Steven M. Hughes created a new community and database to help black travelers avoid these negative travel experiences. Their platform is called Journey Black Homeand it helps travelers find and book black-owned Airbnbs.
In July 2021, after the couple sold most of their belongings to start traveling and living full-time in Airbnbs, Boyd, a strategist and brand consultant, and Hughes, a financial therapist, compiled this resource together.
“When we launched our nomadic home journey last July, we created Journey Black Home to share our travels with friends and family through social media and our blog,” Hughes said via email. “We realized very quickly that our existing community, as well as others who started to follow, found a lot of value in our content.”
The couple prioritized Black-owned sharing Restaurants and stores, as well as black-centric experiences, online, but finding black-owned and hosted Airbnbs proved trickier. As they gathered options, they decided that a thorough listing of their findings could be extremely useful to others. black travelers.
“Initially, we searched the listings one by one on the Airbnb app until we gathered a list of 200 stays,” Boyd said, explaining their strategy. “We’ve researched listings on major black domestic travel sites over the past few years and made sure to cover those cities first. [and] once the listing was launched, we created a landing page for the public to submit ads. It has become our main source of new stays.
Now, Journey Black Home has over 200 black-owned Airbnb listings spanning 30 states featuring properties through their Instagram account @blackairbnbs. There is a specific set of criteria that these homes meet: Airbnbs must be owned or hosted by black people and in the United States; they must have an Airbnb profile showing the name and face of the host (because black hosts who choose to show their face rather than a property logo or photo on their profile are more likely to experience racial prejudice); they must have an average rating of 4.0 or higher, with mostly positive reviews; and they should be proactive in responding to constructive feedback or negative customer reviews.
Some of their favorite properties, as featured on their Twitter account, include a bungalow with three bedrooms and a bathroom nestled near Los Angeles SoFi Stadium with all five star reviews, and this beautifully decorated one-bedroom, one-bathroom penthouse in the heart of Baltimore, Maryland, not far from the inner harbor.
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