NYT: *Hotels Grapple with Racial Bias Like Major Brands Uber, Starbucks, Airbnb

Last edited Sat Aug 4, 2018, 01:03 AM - Edit history (1)

"Hotels Grapple with Racial Bias," The New York Times, Aug. 1, 2018.

Incidents of racial bias have hit major consumer brands, including Uber, Starbucks and Airbnb. Now they are cropping up at hotels, unsettling guests, spreading via social media with the hashtag #TravelingWhileBlack, and leading some in the travel industry to revisit diversity training and evaluate its effectiveness.

In May, The Washington Post ran a story about a hotel clerk at the Country Inn & Suites by Radisson in Newport News, Va., calling a black guest a “monkey.” The employee was fired, according to a statement by the hotel general manager.

In June, Carle Wheeler, an African-American software engineer from Dallas who stayed at the Westin Pasadena in California, posted a Facebook video showing a white man asking her and her daughter if they had bathed before swimming in the pool. The video shows the hotel manager dismissing the man from the scene while encouraging the distraught family to “enjoy the pool.” Though the man who had made the offensive remark to Ms. Wheeler was not a hotel employee, Ms. Wheeler felt that the manager should have confronted him sooner, according to the Washington Post.

And in July, an African-American man and his son returned to their room at the Art Ovation Hotel in Sarasota, Fla., part of Marriott’s Autograph Collection of hotels, to find a racist note in their room. The hotel later determined it had been left by a previous guest and did not target the family.

While the hotel companies involved expressed zero tolerance for bias from either employees or guests, the incidents did not elicit apologies from top corporate executives, as did more high-profile incidents, such as the Starbucks case in Philadelphia, in which an employee called the police on two African-American men waiting for a friend.
“The incidents did not seem to create some new wave of sensitivity training or messaging,” said Bjorn Hanson, a professor in the Jonathan M. Tisch Center for Hospitality and Tourism at New York University School of Professional Studies, who explained that hotel employee training in diversity is common in an industry built upon welcoming people from around the world.

..Travel for African-Americans has been a fraught experience for generations. From 1936 to 1967, “The Negro Motorist Green Book,” founded by Victor H. Green, a New York postal worker, identified welcoming places for African-Americans that included not only hotels, restaurants and gas stations, but any service one might need on the road, according to Candacy Taylor, an author and photographer who is documenting Green Book sites....

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