Black & Abroad partnered with Shutterstock to address bias in AI-generated travel imagery while re-engaging past guests. The "See You There" campaign used generative AI (gen AI) to personalize travel experiences and highlight racial bias in AI models. This initiative led to 81 million impressions, 3,400 bias reports, and new travel photography grants to improve representation.
Black & Abroad is a tour operator that caters to Black travelers. With 30 percent of revenue coming from repeat business, the brand wanted an opportunity to re-engage with past guests to drive new bookings. As a small organization catering to an underserved demographic, it was also critical that the brand find a way to strengthen its position as an innovative, purpose-driven brand.
Since 2015, Black & Abroad has always looked for tech-forward ways to inspire and empower travel. A one-to-one campaign that uses AI to imagine past guests at upcoming destinations — and drive repeat bookings — was the latest evolution of the brand's purpose, as was the creation of a solution to the problem of bias in gen AI.
Black & Abroad offers luxury travel experiences for an underserved and underrepresented customer base: young, upwardly mobile members of the Black community across the U.S. and Canada.
"See You There" began as a one-to-one campaign using AI to imagine past guests at upcoming destinations — and drive repeat bookings — but it quickly became a global solution for addressing bias in gen AI models.
The multi-faceted project included:
The One-to-One Experience
Customers who had been on a previous Black & Abroad trip received an opt-in email, which led them to a personalized digital experience with gen AI images of them at five of the brand's upcoming destinations — and a call to action to book.
Uncovering Bias
While generating images of its guests Black & Abroad uncovered evidence of racial bias woven into the ways AI models are built and trained — and in what they can produce. Since fewer photos of Black travelers exist online, there is less data for models to be trained on which leads to biased outputs.
Shutterstock
The heart of the issue is the lack of representation in travel photography on the platforms these AI models use for training. Black & Abroad partnered with one of the largest, Shutterstock, to produce a brief for its photographers — fueled by Black & Abroad's insights — highlighting destinations, scenarios, and communities lacking representation.
The Bias Reporting System
The Generative AI Bias Reporting System is Black & Abroad's data solution to bias in gen AI text, image, and video. On the brand's site, it invited users to enter instances of bias, and help in creating structured data at scale, for use by anyone in development of gen AI models.
Analyzing Bias in Gen AI
Eleven-thousand images of past guests were sorted and ingested into a secure cleanroom environment to test, train, and refine Black & Abroad's AI models. The brand documented problematic image outputs alongside patterns in the prompts driving them, publishing a report of its findings on seeyouthere.ai.
A New Solution to Represent on Shutterstock
Black & Abroad's data insights were used in partnership with one of the world's largest stock photo platforms, Shutterstock, to produce a brief highlighting underrepresented travel scenarios which was shared with millions of photographers on the platform. The brand then established a grant to fund and encourage participation.
Black & Abroad is among the world's most prominent niche-audience travel brands. The brand is known for its international trips to Latin America, Europe, and Africa — and its provocative "Go Back to Africa" campaign. With the pandemic's impact finally fading, 2024 was a critical time to re-engage with past guests with a campaign that would live up to its past purpose-driven work.
Results
