Things We Learned from Afar's Co-Founder This Month

This month, I had the pleasure of speaking with Afar travel media’s co-founder, Joe Diaz, on Independent Lodging Congress’s Instagram Live series. Here’s what we learned. 

Afar’s future is all about experiential travel.

Right out of the gate, Joe told us all about how he and co-founder Greg Sullivan created Afar, which, if you’re most familiar with the magazine by the same name, actually expands beyond a magazine to an entire media company. 

The media company was started after a trip to India where Greg and Joe were enjoying experiential travel for themselves, before experiential travel was the cool thing. They started Afar as a way to expand travelers’ knowledge and awareness of these unique travel experiences that went beyond, say, lying on a beach at a resort for five days and then heading home, and that’s where Afar’s future lies, too, especially after the challenges of the last year of travel. 

To sum it up, in Joe’s words, what is experiential travel? He says, “it means getting your ass off the tour bus and sitting at the kitchen table with people… When that happens, we can leverage that to have a beneficial impact on the planet… and on the communities.” Travel, he adds, is the best form of education.

Attracting travelers to your hospitality or tourism business is all about getting in the right mindset.

According to Joe, for hospitality or tourism providers wanting to attract travelers like those that read Afar, it’s all about putting yourself in the mindset of the consumer. And what are the values that attract affluent, well-traveled travelers? He says, “it’s a global citizen ethic. Sustainability has been a big word thrown around a lot. It’s about being a good steward and using your experience to make the world a better place.” 

For Joe, for any business looking to attract Afar’s readership, they have to start with that purpose and spirit in order to better align with the way those travelers see the world. 

In terms of sustainability certification, don’t try to do it all, all at once. 

There are hundreds of sustainability certification programs, and many of them come with a cost. How’s a hotel GM and their management company make sense of them all? It’s important for independent hotels with limited budgets to realize that sustainability certification is comprehensive and you likely can’t do it all, all at once. Pick one north star and one standard of sustainability to go with. Joe’s pick? The Global Sustainable Tourism Council. 

Putting my commercial FF&E hat on: over the past decade, I’ve been really impressed with the evolution and the delivery of service of www.mindclick.com.  MindClick “rates the environmental health performance of manufacturers and their products.  The result: product intelligence that drives transparency and innovation across organizations and their supply chains to meet global demand for healthier products and healthier environments.”  This makes it much easier for manufacturers to transparently show their impact, environmentally, socially, and from the perspective of corporate governance.  It makes it super easy for hotel brands, owners, operators, purchasers, designers, and architects to show the marketplace their commitment to “why” they believe so strongly in making a difference.

Now’s the time for hotels to broaden the scope of their sustainability efforts.

Sustainability can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. The shift that’s happening now is that consumers are waking up, Joe says, to the idea that they want to vote with their values and use their wallets to show people what they stand for. Consumers are also realizing the breadth of sustainability and that it’s not just one thing, like plastic straws or greenhouse gas emissions. They're realizing that sustainability is also about supporting local businesses, taking care of employees and diversity — and hotels should be attempting to broaden the span of their sustainability efforts as a result. 

Need to attract more travelers to your brand? Focus on content. 

One thing Joe’s team has learned over the last year? The role content plays in engaging and inspiring consumers. In the last 12 months, he says, when virtually no one traveled, his editorial team pivoted and focused on empathy-based journalism and service-driven journalism. That approach, he says, resulted in a 150% increase in traffic to the Afar website. 

That said, there’s a pent-up demand for travel currently and people are hungry for information. Content is important and developing a content strategy is crucial to attracting travelers to your brand.

Want more?

Check out the full conservation with Joe and get all of his tips for hoteliers and insights into today’s tourism industry, here:https://www.instagram.com/tv/COQpKzQFaIb/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link.