#TravelisLove is a campaign launched against the "fear of the other". The initiative's objective is to reinforce what the Conde Nast Traveler brand stands for: inclusiveness, fearless discovery, and curiosity of the unknown.
Amid all the terrorist attacks of 2016, the world felt (and feels) like a very scary place. With Condé Nast Traveler's #TravelisLove campaign, we urged our followers to travel far and fearlessly. Now is the time to travel more than ever.
In a series of videos and social media posts promoting #TravelisLove, we highlighted people from all different walks of life—from Iran to Peru—showing that the way to beat prejudice and ignorance is to experience the world and the people who live in it. As Mark Twain said, "travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness."
Yes, we live in uncertain times. But staying home and hand-wringing won't do anyone any good. "The more we engage with the world, rather than run from it, the more clearly we'll understand that it's really not us versus them. It's just us," our editor in chief Pilar Guzmán said in Conde Nast Traveler's March 2016 issue.
In the wake of the Orlando shooting, we released a series of short videos on social media showing how people live in other parts of the world, including Nepal, Peru, Iceland, Iran, France, and more. The purpose of the series was to show personal stories rooted in families and the places they come from—and to highlight places that you may not think twice about when planning your future travels.
We worked with a series of notable philanthropists, celebrities and politicians, including John Kerry, Aerin Lauder, and Padma Lakshmi, who told us why they think now is the time to travel the world. Their stories served as a source of inspiration during the year—a reason to keep fighting.
We encouraged our followers to share their own #TravelisLove stories on Facebook and Instagram. To us, we are all travelers. The only thing that divides us is land.
Our multimedia posts on Instagram received more than 500,000 impressions. On Facebook, our videos were viewed more than 300,000 times.
In June 2016 following the Orlando massacre, we had 14,000 uses of the hashtag, where people shared their stories of love and how travel has broadened their horizons. Since then, the #TravelisLove message has reached more than 225,000,000 on Instagram.
In our series of posts, the common feedback from viewers was one of empathy. On a photo of a mother in Peru, one Romanian woman commented, "If you had gone to Romania, you would have been able to take almost the same picture." And from another reader: "Travel broadens concept of home and family. It creates connections to people and places vastly different from our original concept of home and family. It opens our hearts."
As travelers, we are unofficial stewards of the values of the world. The least we can do is to continue spreading a message of love.
