Traveling While Lesbian: Q&A with Girlports President Tanya Churchmuch

Our friend Tanya Churchmuch founded girlports.com a year ago this month. As you’ll see in our conversation below, the site is the first lesbian travel Web site of its kind and Tanya has accomplished a great deal in a short amount of time. To help her celebrate her first anniversary, we thought we’d conduct another Q&A with her to learn more about communicating with lesbian travelers and the future of travel from her perspective.

Ben Finzel: Why did you start girlports.com? Weren't there already other resources for lesbian travelers online?

Tanya Churchmuch: Incredibly enough, there weren’t. Girlports is the one and only lesbian travel information website that exists. I’d always been an avid traveler, for both work (as a television journalist for more than a decade) and pleasure, and it had been a real thorn in my side that there were no easily available, up-to-date online travel resources for lesbians. A lot of sites say they’re for gay men and lesbians, but in reality about 90% of that content is aimed at men. Gay men have tons of information available to them online, and I thought it was time that gay women do too. That’s why I decided to create Girlports.

Ben Finzel: What kind of reception have you had in the year since you've been online? Is your traffic growing?

Tanya Churchmuch: I’m so happy to say that I’ve had a fantastic reception since Girlports launched back in October 2007. In the LGBT travel industry, which really is quite small, I’ve already become recognized as somewhat of a specialist in regards to lesbian travel. To that end, I’ve been invited to speak at both the recent IGLTA convention in Las Vegas and the Community Marketing Gay and Lesbian Tourism conference in Vancouver. The public reception has also been quite positive and definitely, the number of unique visitors continues to grow.

Ben Finzel: What kind of reaction do you get from convention and visitors bureaus, airlines, hotels and other tourism service providers when you tell them what you do?

Tanya Churchmuch: It runs the entire gamut, from people who are completely interested to those who have very little interest. Girlports is not a big name yet, and many people want you to prove yourself before they invest any time or effort learning about you. I also think that some people haven’t yet realized the true market potential of lesbians, and they continue to stick with what they know best: gay men.

On the other hand, some organizations have been fantastic. Tourism boards like Key West, Florida, Tempe, Arizona and Dallas, Texas went the extra mile to get me down to their destination in the months following the launch of Girlports because they wanted to make sure that lesbians knew about their cities. They were interested in learning more about the lesbian community and how to better promote themselves to us. All in all though, I really do think I’m quite fortunate to do what I do with Girlports and I honestly believe that as time goes on, more and more companies and organizations will want to reach out to the lesbian market and Girlports will be one of the vehicles they use to do this.

Ben Finzel: The travel industry has been around for centuries and has always changed with the times and available technology. As sites like yours take hold, how do you think the experience of travel will change in the future?

Tanya Churchmuch: What I love about traveling is the adventure of discovering new places thanks to research done before I leave and pure luck when I actually get there. What has traditionally been difficult for lesbian travelers though, was the ability to discover like-minded women in foreign environments. A site like Girlports changes that, simply by existing. Besides offering basic information of what these places are, Girlports has a mapping system (thanks to Google technology), which allows you to create your own itinerary. You can even print your own maps showing you where all of these places are in relation to one another. That would have been impossible just five years ago, but now you can go to so many places in the world and always find your way. For a lesbian traveler, it means she can now discover that lesbian bar in Seoul, that women-only B&B in Berlin, that women’s café in Mexico City. How amazing is that???

I think that in the coming years we’ll see a lot more integration between websites like Girlports and apps on your mobile phone. It will make it even quicker and easier for us to learn about places while traveling and then have easy directions to get to these spots.  Don’t know how to order a drink in Spanish? You’ll just look it up on your Spanish audio phrasebook app. Don’t know how the toilet works in Japan? You’ll just do a quick Google search on your iPhone.  I only hope this easily accessible information will affect foreign travel in a positive way though, and not encourage people to zip through a locale without making the effort to converse and connect with locals, because that really is the best way to discover a new destination.

Ben Finzel: Thank you, Tanya. It’s great to hear that digital communication is helping to expand resources for lesbian travelers and further demonstrate the power and potential of the lesbian travel market. Keep up the great work!

Comments

[New England Holidays]

This is a really good resource for Traveller. It answers a number of questions I have had on my mind and it is very nicely written.

Good job!