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Black Americans spent $145 billion on home journey in 2023 alone.
But the tourism business typically overlooks this section of the inhabitants, lots of whom search experiences that embrace tradition and heritage in protected and welcoming locations.
A 3-day tourism summit headed to Milwaukee in October goals to coach, empower and help Black journey and tourism professionals to raised service this market.
“We want to be able to create opportunities for people like us, who look like us, to be able to travel more and to experience the Black experience,” stated Anita Moreau, founder & CEO of Black Travel Summit, a world platform selling journey and trailblazing people within the tourism business.
The Black Travel Summit 2026 takes place Oct 15-18 on the Baird Center. Themed “Renaissance: Rebirth, Renew, Reclaim,” it capitalizes on the legacy of town’s Bronzeville neighborhood and its Black cultural id.
In 2022, The New York Times included the Bronzeville neighborhood in its annual record of 52 places to visit, which options locations across the globe. And the National Geographic named the Brew City one in every of its 25 best places to travel to in 2023 on its annual Best of the World record.
The summit, held along side the Black Travel Alliance, will open with a Black Travel Film pageant at Nõ Studios. It will characteristic panel discussions and workshops on creating and sustaining a journey enterprise in addition to periods on content material creation, hospitality, relocation companies, and journey media.
The summit is geared towards Black journey professionals, journey content material creators, hoteliers, buyers and the more and more standard “group tour” operators. But additionally it is open to others working within the business.
“We want to be able to help those within our community build their platforms, businesses and to become successful in this space,” Moreau said.
Last year’s summit featured Kellee Edwards, a pilot, scuba diver and solo adventurer. She became the first Black woman to host a travel series on the Travel Channel. Nicole Phillip, a journalist and award-winning travel creator, will host this year’s summit. Phillip creates travel content on history and culture but also reviews destinations on Black and people of color “friendliness.”
Increasing Black travelers to the Cream City
Visit Milwaukee courted the globetrotting summit to come to Milwaukee. Last year it was held in Brazil.
The summit, which attracts a bevy of Black journalists and content creators, will help the agency market Milwaukee as a destination for Black leisure travelers, said Claire Koenig, Visit Milwaukee’s Vice President of Communications and Advocacy.
The agency has been intentional about increasing visits among Black travelers to the city. Milwaukee, Koenig said, is wonderfully diverse, but the demographic makeup of its visitors hasn’t been. In July 2026, 67% of visitors to Milwaukee were White, compared with 10% Black. Milwaukee’s Black population is 37%, according to the Census Bureau.
Bringing the summit here can help elevate stories about the city’s Black culture, Black-owned businesses and restaurants in a way that no amount of advertising budgets can, Koenig said.
“That’s why that kind of conference is appealing to us,” Koenig stated. “We have amazing stories to tell and rich history in our Black community – all facets of it. Some of those stories haven’t been told enough.”
The summit plans to work with native companies and Visit Milwaukee to create cultural tours and experiences that help audiences understand the legacy and contributions of Black Milwaukee, said Moreau, a London native now living in Miami.
A ardour for archeology and journey birthed Black Travel Summit
The summit started in 2019. It grew out of Moreau mixing her two passions — archeology and journey collectively. Moreau, who holds a grasp’s in archeology from the University College of London, at all times had an curiosity within the contributions of Blacks all through historical past.
She wished to spotlight the work of Black journey and tourism professionals and content material creators. These companies typically exist in obscurity as a result of they lack a platform to advertise or to scale their companies. That leaves many Black vacationers unaware of their existence or wrestle to seek out them.
“A lot of us need to bootstrap. Sometimes we don’t necessarily have the capital to promote our services with the reach that we need,” Moreau stated.
The summit gives that attain and a chance for these professionals to community and be taught from one another.
The Black travel movement is not new
Black travel has been a long tradition that predates the Jim Crow era.
“The Black travel movement is not new. We have been traveling for a very long time,” Moreau said.
But the spike Black travel has received over the past decade has been sparked by social media. More Black people are putting their travel experiences on social media, piquing interest and curiosity from others.
These Black content creators are exposing people to new experiences and new places unknown to them, Moreau said. And many of these experiences, she added, center on culture, heritage and identity. The summit will help content creators leverage social media to better tell stories about the Black travel experience.
“I think this sense of belonging; this sense of identity has always been existent in our communities,” she said.
More importantly, she noted, Black travelers want destinations that are welcoming. Far too long Blacks have felt unwelcomed in certain spaces when they travel, even now. The Negro Motorist Green Book arose to help Blacks travel safely during the Jim Crow era, she noted.
These travel posts, she added, help Blacks to see themselves in different places they thought were previously unwelcoming or never imagined these places would be. It also informs them about other Afrodiasporic communities that exist in other countries like the Maniq tribe in Thailand, Moreau stated.
“…Our presence in this globe, I think, is something that allows us to feel more like we belong on this planet,” she stated, “and that cultural awareness is going to drive us to travel more as well.”
Black leisure travelers are a $145 billion industry
Often overlooked, Black Americans are a significant market in the travel industry. In 2023, U.S. Black travelers took over 184 million trips, spending $145 billion. That’s up from the $109 billion they spent on tourism in 2019, according to Travel Noir.
And a report from Mandala Research Firm indicated 17% of Blacks take one or more international trips and travel locally more than six times per year, according to the Black Travel Summit’s website.
The summit’s goal is not only to support the local tourism ecosystem but also to support Black-owned businesses “to create residual financial impression in that neighborhood,” Moreau stated.
The journey market is not only for tour operators. Other companies like retail, eating places or espresso retailers can capitalize on this market too. The key, Moreau stated, is getting on the radar of a metropolis’s native tourism workplace, like Visit Milwaukee. These workplaces may also help market a enterprise’s services and products because it pertains to tourism.
“It’s their job to provide opportunities for those within their network,” she stated.
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