Uniting an Industry for Safety
Women’s safety in the travel, transportation, and tech industries
Safety Concerns are Universal
Safety concerns are nearly universal for marginalized groups when they travel. 76% of women say safety concerns have a significant impact on where they travel¹ and 55% of LGBTQ+ travelers have experienced discrimination when traveling². Importantly, these groups will reward companies that address their concerns with 46% of women saying they would travel more if safety wasn’t a concern¹ and 64% of LGBTQ+ travelers being more likely to book with brands that support their community².
Competitors or Collaborators?
While at Uber, JP and his team focused on helping the company address the concerns of women and LGBTQ+ users. We quickly realized, though, that if Uber was to truly create a safer platform, it needed to help improve safety and inclusion of the broader industry. Uber riders and drivers used all rideshare options and bad actors could move between platforms, adversely impacting the entire industry.
Additionally, the safety issues that affected Uber didn’t just impact its direct competitors, but impacted companies throughout the travel and transportation industry as well. Since the problem was industry-wide, the solution had to be too. We set out to do three things:
Demonstrate that Uber was a leader in safety
Provide the broader industry with the information and tools needed to improve safety on their own platforms
Encourage partnership within the industry and outside with third-party experts
We worked to be collaborators on safety, not competitors.
Safety as a Core Competency, Not a Competitive Advantage
We built off of our prior work on Uber’s Driving Change initiative and created an off-the-record industry gathering packed with safety research, expert panels, and industry-wide safety best practices and resources. We brought together executives from the technology, airline, hotel, homeshare, and rental car industries to share knowledge and answer the question, “How can we work together to improve the safety of women and marginalized groups?”
This began with grounding all attendees with common knowledge about the experience of women and marginalized groups while traveling. Commissioned research revealed women’s and marginalized communities’ primary concerns, the experiences of travel industry employees, and what actions would make each of these groups feel safer.
We leveraged the partnerships established with Uber’s Driving Change initiative to host panels on the unique experiences of women, Black, and trans individuals. These partners also helped moderate a brainstorming exercise amongst the attending executives to improve the safety of the most marginalized on their platforms.
Finally, we shared a white paper featuring a taxonomy that Uber developed in partnership with experts to categorize sexual harm and misconduct which contributed to its first ever Transparency Report. This taxonomy was shared as a resource that anyone in the industry could use to better quantify the harms on their respective platform to improve their safety efforts.
New Standards for the Industry
This event was the first step in inspiring the travel, transportation, and tech industries to do more for the safety of women and marginalized communities. The taxonomy presented by Uber has been adopted by competitors and used as the foundation for their Transparency Reports. Publishing Transparency Reports has become a more common practice amongst tech peers and has even begun to expand to other industries, first voluntarily and then due to regulations.
Many of the companies present forged partnerships with the same or similar safety organizations that Uber had partnered with, making expert collaborations a more common industry practice. Some of these partners developed separate divisions in their organizations to better engage with corporations.
The gathering inspired several working groups amongst the employees across the companies in attendance to share ideas and further develop strategy. Uber was recognized with the Silver Adrian Award for Public Relations for hosting the event. This event is only the start of further safety collaborations amongst travel, transportation, and tech.
[1] MMGY Global Survey on US Travelers (2018).
[2] Booking.com survey on LGBTQ+ travelers globally (2022).
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