Kenneth Kiesnoski spoke with Jonathan Klein, owner of Now, Voyager World Wide Travel Services in San Francisco, about the LGBT market's challenges and trends.
Travel Weekly: LGBT travel has long been touted as a surefire money-maker. As gays and lesbians gain greater acceptance, is the market living up to the hype?
Jonathan Klein: It's the way it should be to have everyone be gay-friendly and welcoming, and there's been significant strides in the area. But I think that overall, it's really been overhyped. The number of gay people is, at best guess, maybe 5% of the population. And within that number, it's not like every person has all kinds of disposable income and travels all the time. That being said, for a lot of gay people, men especially, who are not having financial difficulties, travel is an important part of their lives.
TW: Can mainstream agents make money selling LGBT travel?
Klein: All travel agents love to sell things like escorted tours, but for the most part LGBT travelers are not drawn to that sort of experience unless it happens to be an all-gay escorted tour, which are very few and far between. And even then there are LGBT people reluctant to do it because they're not sure they want to be stuck with the same small group of people for the whole trip. Gay cruises have always been head and shoulders above everything else. As opposed to an escorted tour, you're stuck with 2,000 people on a ship rather than 20 on a bus.
TW: OK, should mainstream agents bother selling LGBT travel?
Klein: No travel agent is going to turn away business and refer it to someone else. I wish they would. Frankly, I do think that only people who specialize in and have lots of experience in travel for LGBT people [are aware] of the many nuances to the market. For mainstream travel, anyone can go on a fam trip to a place and get to know it or get a visit from a sales rep. But there are no fam trips for straight agents to experience gay travel. So I don't think for a travel agent it's necessarily something worth the effort of getting into.
TW: What are the trends in LGBT travel?
Klein: For the summertime, we're booking lots of trip to Europe, whether it's a cruise or FIT. During winter, we used to sell a lot of trips to Hawaii and Mexico. They're still the most popular places for gay people, at least on the West Coast, to go to. But the problem is they're the easiest places for consumers to book themselves online, especially if travelers have already been there before. The more far-flung places that we do book quite a bit of include Thailand and South America, particularly Peru, Argentina and Brazil.
TW: Has the legalization of same-sex marriage in eight U.S. states affected your business?
Klein: I book pretty much no gay weddings. I have booked a couple of trips that clients are calling honeymoons, but where they go has nothing to do with whether the place they're going allows gay marriage. People here in California are not going to be flying off to New York to get married. I've seen absolutely no bump in business from marriage laws or repeal of "Don't ask don't tell."