Building on its success as the first and only Black travel booking and review platform, Green Book Global is expanding its services with a new Road Trip Planner app feature.
With Green Book Global already established as a modern interactive guide for Black travelers, the company has now added a feature to help plan safer and more enjoyable road trips across the U.S. This new Road Trip Planner tool, launched within its redesigned mobile app (available on iOS and Android) and accessible via web application, is powered by community-driven insights and data.
“Our mission has always been to empower Black travelers with information that fosters a safer and more inclusive travel environment,” Lawrence Phillips, founder and CEO of Green Book Global, told Forbes. “With the Road Trip Planner, we are turning the collective experiences of our community into a powerful tool that maps out the best routes and highlights areas to avoid based on historical and recent data.
“This is more than a planning tool. It’s a new layer of security for our community,” he added.
Named after The Negro Motorist Green Book, which provided travel guidance for African Americans navigating Jim Crow America from 1936 to 1966, Green Book Global is a modern-day app and interactive guide designed to aid Black travelers in the 21st century. By tapping into thousands of user-generated reviews from Black travelers, the app can help users plan safer trips by identifying optimal routes and avoiding areas known to be unwelcoming or potentially unsafe.
“Our goal is to provide information so that Black travelers can make that very personal decision about where they want to go,” Phillips said.
According to data from Green Book Global, some of the most welcoming destinations in the U.S. for Black travelers include Atlanta, Houston, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Charlotte, and Chicago. The platform also offers an International Destination Discovery Tool, featuring recommendations for diverse places such as Kenya, Slovenia, and Argentina.
Phillips highlights that the new Planner tool enables motorists to select “Avoid City” to bypass sundown towns, automatically rerouting them.
“Cities are rated on a five-star scale by our community for what it’s like Traveling While Black and cities receive an overall score,” he explains. “Green represents the safest and most welcoming destination, yellow indicates average, and red means it needs improvement. Red indicates a city where Black travelers generally have not felt safe or welcome, and it may even signify a former sundown town.”
The research has also brought some unexpected findings to light on cities that may be predominantly white but contain a small but mighty Black population.
“Portland, Maine, was a big surprise,” Phillips says. “Although Maine is one of the whitest states in America, with a Black population of almost 2%, the city of Portland is nearly 10% Black. It was amazing. Great food, plenty of activities, and a welcoming atmosphere.”