Latifah Chinnery and Verl Thomas of Equator 3 Tours, LLC are
dedicated to giving their customers a unique and memorable experience
in international travel. Chinnery says traveling is a uniquely
rewarding experience that all African Americans should embrace.
It’s more affordable than you think:
Chinnery:
“We have a payment plan associated with all of our group trips. So we
just break it down and give [customers] lots of time to play. We plan
out more than a year. For example, we have a 31-day cruise that starts
in Cape Town, South Africa and cruises up the entire west coast of
Africa up through Europe and ends in London. We started planning that
trip about 20 months out. Therefore, the payments were relatively low.
People who may not have been able to pay for that trip in one lump sum,
when you divide it up into 18 parts, it becomes affordable.”
It can be culturally enlightening and spiritually enriching:
Chinnery:
“The exposure brings history alive. You go and you see [the world] for
yourself, as opposed to relying on literature to inform you about
different places and people. You connect with the world and that makes
you a richer person. I enjoy watching [people’s] minds open up and soak
up all that they see. One thing that’s a recurring response to us is
that they are enjoying the information.”
More black men need to travel globally:
Thomas:
“We have a lesser degree of males when it comes to African American
travelers. It’s almost down to nil, that’s one of the things that
really struck me outright, compared to other ethnic groups. When you
have a Caucasian group, you have a number of males almost equal to
females. But when it comes to blacks, that is not the case.”
There are a wealth of exotic locales the world over, but Chinnery
noticed three particular places that are popular with African
Americans, and Equator 3 is happy to arrange a route to visit them.
“Black people want to go to Africa, and [they] want to go to Brazil. We
found those two. The Caribbean also,” she says. “African American
people are very curious about those three destinations and those are
three destinations that we specialize in. We have an affinity for
Africa, Brazil and the Caribbean.”
–todd williams
