Are We Empowering Women Business Travellers?

By Fernanda Veiga, Kaelis Chief Marketing Officer

18/07/2018

According to new research from the Global Business Travel Association and WWStay “women account for nearly 40% of business travelers based in the United States, which represents a higher percentage than three to five years ago”. I was quite surprised when I recently read this in the news and it seems we are missing an opportunity to Improve Travel Experience.

Everybody is talking about women empowerment. The empowerment word was created at the UN’s World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 to refer to the increase in the participation of women in decision-making processes and access to power, leading to an improvement on women’ quality of life.

What has the travel industry done to empower Women Business Travellers? There are only two things that comes to my mind. First, over the past two decades, the airports have increased the number of shops and duty free offers significantly. However, if you are a frequent flyer, you know every shop and every offer within your local airport. Secondly, five years ago, we started to change the colour/shape of the Business and First amenity kits.

Is that enough to empower women Business travellers? No, that is not enough.

What could we do so women would feel more comfortable when flying? According to my personal experience, it would be a great idea to:

Amenity kits: to include make-up remover tissues as we can never use the lotions/serums we are offered in the kit because we are already using make-up. In addition, it would be nice to have a facial cream like a BB cream so we can get a bit of a colour before landing.

Airplane toilets/lounge rooms to include female pads/tampons as we all know our menstrual cycles can get irregular when flying and/or adjusting to jet lag. We can always find razors and shaving cream everywhere.

Lounge and flight to include more female magazines options. Lounges are fully equipped with Business, Cars, Boats and Watch magazines and sometimes no female reading.

Airport infrastructure to include express nail bars and express blow-dry bars with more than one person working. We can only see some massage places.

Drinks: lady-like Cocktails for flights (very few airlines are offering at the moment).

Very few times we see female pilots working and most often they do not have a female looking uniform. They are forced to wear the men’s pilot uniform, including a tie.

Don’t you think?
I invite the industry to think about these points and reflect and make these changes happen.

I would love to know your opinion about this topic. Feel free to write me in my LinkedIn profile and get to know your suggestions.

As I am a frequent flyer since the age of 4, the more and more I agree with Virgina Woolf, “As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.”

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