Traveling While Black: How Anthony and Marlie Love Are Redefining Inclusive Travel
Entrepreneurs: Anthony and Marlie Love
Tilt: Providing travel resources and historical context for Black travelers.
Primary Channel: Website
Other Channels: YouTube (15.1K), Instagram (35.2K), TikTok (78K), newsletter
Time to First Dollar: About 1 year
Rev Streams: Paid YouTube memberships, partnerships with destination marketing organizations, brand collaborations, television show production (Fox Soul), and merch
Our Favorite Actionable Advice:
- Find a gap: After a move to Seattle for work, the Loves were traveling the region and wanted to know where Black people would feel comfortable visiting. They didn’t find much content to help them, so they created their own.
- Make it count: Anthony and Marlie use a consistent rating system, tackling comfort, fun, and the drive, which makes it easy for at-a-glance viewers to assess the destinations.
- Change your budget: After four or five years as a side business, the duo quit their full-time jobs and downsized to a one-bedroom, one-bath apartment to focus solely on the business. (They also had built up savings to give them a year to do it.)
- Bring in the professionals: A PR professional and agent have helped them grow the business more quickly.
It’s hard to operate a travel-focused content business when you have a traditional job and a traditional vacation allowance.
Anthony and Marlie Love made it work for almost five years, but the business was growing, and their vacation time was dwindling. So, they made a big decision.
“We told ourselves we’re going to give ourselves one year to leap all in,” Marlie says.
They quit their full-time jobs and downsized from their three-bedroom, three-bath house to a one-bedroom, one-bath apartment. They also had some savings if they needed help during that year.
That was March 2024. And now, a year later, the content business is doing so well that Anthony and Marlie aren’t thinking about returning to traditional employment.
Origins of Traveling While BlackLike many content business owners, the Loves didn’t set out to be content entrepreneurs.
In 2019, the couple moved from St. Louis to Seattle for Anthony’s job at Boeing, and Marlie took a job at the University of Washington. Their new location brought visits from family members, and they all wanted to get out and travel in the region.
“We needed something to do. We were looking for resources for Black travelers,” Anthony explains. Inspired by the Negro Motorist Green Book, a guidebook for Black travelers from 1936 to 1966, the Loves saw a void in content for the Black community about safe and inclusive travel destinations.
This led to their YouTube channel, Traveling While Black (TWB), in October 2019. Around that same time, they got their first content trade deal with Zeacon, a Seattle-based app to find last-minute events and things happening.
The Loves created videos about their travels around the northwest United States and southwest Canada. (Later, they added trips outside those regions to their lineup.)
In 2020, a national outcry grew loud around the killing of George Floyd and further raised awareness of the discrimination faced by the Black community. It also brought more awareness to the need for businesses like Traveling While Black.
In keeping with its Green Book inspiration, TWB ratings for the travel destinations include a comfort category. Originally, scores were given for how they felt during the visit, the amount of other Black people seen, the visibility of inclusive signs, the prevalence of Black history, and the most recent Black population numbers. More recently, they replaced the last two with diversity of the destination’s marketing and quality of access to local cultural groups.
The level-of-fun category rates qualities of activities, demographic applicability, quality of restaurants, affordability and special events. The drive-grade category encompasses quality of views, roadside amenities, route simplicity, roadside attractions, and quality of parking options.
Their videos are more than travelog. The Loves envelope history into almost every narrative so viewers can learn more about the area and the context of its development.
“We always say the best way to understand why a place is, is to understand how it came to be looking back at its history,” Anthony explains. This unique approach attracted partnerships, such as their collaboration with Nicodemus, Kansas, to tell the story of the all-Black homestead community.
Making it a business
Their first paid gig came from Seattle Southside, a tourism organization, in 2021.
“They reached out, and they’re like, ‘How much were you charged?’ We’re like, oh my gosh, I don’t know,” Marlie recalls.
The Loves did online research and quoted $1K, which was readily accepted. The experience highlighted the need for better industry knowledge regarding pricing.
Joining the Black Travelers Alliance proved pivotal to their long-term success. “They work with Black travel content creators to teach them the industry on how to take content creation and actually make it into a business,” Anthony says.
The Loves participated in the alliance’s workshops and networking opportunities and even took a trip to the Galapagos Islands in October 2023, where they learned about running a content business as well as the travel destination. The excursion helped motivate their decision to pursue Traveling While Black full time.
As their business grew, they recognized the need for professional help. They hired a PR agent and later a talent agent. “We realized that was very important to help us gain more revenue. We needed someone to help us with the brand,” Marlie explains.
Cultivating relationships with other businesses has been instrumental to their success. Last year, Seattle-based media company Converge Media was talking to Fox Soul, a cable and streaming channel. Converge showed their current shows along with Traveling While Black, and that led Fox Soul to pick up TWB for a 10-episode season that aired last fall. That success has led to a second season later this year.
Anthony and Marlie operate their business with an even bigger picture in mind. “We know that Traveling While Black is just one thing of many that we want to do, so we want to get into producing other films, other shows,” Anthony says.
So their business entity is Chase the Dream Productions, not Traveling While Black.
And they already got a grant from Open Gates to start their first production – a movie about the largest influx of Black people to the state of Washington at one time that they first covered on TWB. “It’s really exciting,” Anthony says.
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