“It’s made us feel unwelcome, disrespected,” said Jemma Louise Gough, 38, after the host of an Airbnb in Manchester cancelled a booking for her and a friend because they are from Wales.
“We just wanted a bed for the night ”she told Stephen Nolan on BBC Radio 5 Live. “It’s also made us feel judged for something unrelated to our character or intentions as a guest.
“I was so shocked that this is still happening in this day and age. If this was about race or religion, there would be global outrage. It comes in many forms, discrimination. But it all warrants attention. It’s all unacceptable and it deserves to be spoken out about.”
So how widespread is discrimination in travel? These are the key questions and answers.
How bad were the olden days?
Shamefully for an industry that celebrates freedom and is devoted to bringing people together, travel has a long history of discrimination based on nationality, skin colour, sexual orientation and other factors.
After the Second World War, some British hotels advertised the fact that they banned guests from Germany and Austria, and did not employ people from those locations.
South Africa codified racial discrimination with the apartheid laws, restricting the movements of Black citizens and excluding them from better forms of transport. In 1953 the South African minister C R Swart claimed that segregating whites and Black people on the railways and in accommodation was essential. He warned: “If they are continually to travel together on the trains and sleep in the same hotels, eventually we would have racial admixture.”
Segregation was also enforced across much of the US. For three decades until 1966, African Americans wishing to explore their own country had to rely upon the Negro Motorist Green Book to find motels, restaurants and service stations that would serve them; a film about the book later won an Oscar.
As recently as 2018, two gay men aboard an Alaska Airlines flight from New York to Los Angeles were asked by cabin crew to move so that a heterosexual couple could sit together.
In the same year, the Pontins holiday park chain instructed staff to decline or cancel bookings in the names of people who might be Irish travellers, including Gallagher, Murphy and Nolan.
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