Friday, May 18, 2018

Diversity issues...

Some very needful reading, a good piece about mountain biking that could just as easily be about sailing, and in the "is Congressman Mo Brooks dumber than a bag of hammers" department...

Having a charter business is not all fun, frolic, and doing the happy dance.  Sometimes it gets downright depressing.

For instance, over the last couple of decades we've watched a large portion of our clients suffer from the ongoing stagnant economy and resulting hardships entailed.

Then there's the boats who have been caught between a rock and a hard place by rising prices and a client base that has less and less money to spend each year.

That said, there are some good things as well...

When we started Paradise Connections there were a lot of diversity issues within the fleet. It was pretty much an established fact that some boats did not play well with all groups of people who might charter a boat. In those dark days it was considered OK to say gays were not welcome aboard. Fact of the matter was that on every boat's spec sheet there was a place where they could say yes or no to gay charters. That really bothered us and we would not book boats that said "NO". We also would not book boats that had issues of a racist nature either and while those questions were not on the specs sheets, some crews made it quite clear that not all races were welcome.

We didn't book those boats.

As time passed we noticed a lot of the anti-gay element seemed to have left the charter fleet and seemed to be replaced by folks who were more understanding of the diverse nature of people who charter. In other words things were getting better.

Well, at least we thought so...

Now we're noticing some boats are saying "inquire" regarding gay charters and that's all kinds of wrong.

First of all: It's none of my business what sexual orientation our clients follow and I'm not about to ask them. As it happens, it's not my business whether our clients are Hispanic, Jewish, African-American, Muslim, Asian, or whatever either.

Not my business.

Not the boats' business.

But now we have a new President and all of a sudden we're supposed to ask those questions and somehow it's now ok...

Not going to. Nope not in the land of the free and the home of the brave where everyone is equal.

Which means that folks who feel we need to "inquire" regarding our gay clientele are not going to be listed in our charter brokerage. We'll remove them from our website and they won't get charters from us because we're not going to empower their problematic attitudes that have no place in an industry based on hospitality.

Not on our watch.

Listening to Buffalo Tom

So it goes...