Truth Behind Travel Podcast

Challenges and Opportunities for Women and Non-Binary Tourism Entrepreneurs through wmnsWORK

• Dolores Semeraro • Season 4 • Episode 80

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Dolores Semeraro interviews Iris Serbanescu - the founder of wmnsWORK - her journey from risk management to tourism, highlighting her 12-year career in marketing and partnerships. 

How she founded wmnsWORK, an award-winning tourism accelerator for women entrepreneurs, during the pandemic, emphasizing the importance of systemic change, noting that while 60% of the travel workforce is female, only 8% hold executive positions. 

wmnsWORK has supported 60 entrepreneurs over three years, focusing on intuition, networking, and mentorship. 

wmnsWORK is a 12-week virtual, equity free accelerator program designed specifically to support women and non-binary tourism entrepreneurs during the most critical part of their business journey – the early stages.

About Iris:

wmnsWORK was founded in 2022 by Iris Serbanescu, who has spent her decade-long career in the tourism industry consulting with and working alongside entrepreneurial ventures in tourism’s adventure, luxury and tech sectors. Prior to this launch, Iris led partnerships at TourRadar, an online marketplace for multi-day tour operators, and was the manager of trade development at travel consultancy Bannikin before that.

About this episode: 

Starting wmnsWORK During the Pandemic

How the idea came from her desire to support the industry in building back better and her own lived experience in the industry with the resilience and innovation in mind emphasizing the importance of building businesses with intention and aligning them with personal capacity to avoid burnout.

Current State of Women in Travel and Tourism

Based on whether women in tourism are building, thriving, or just getting by, Iris expresses optimism, noting the rapid changes in gender equality and the increasing support for women-led ventures, discussing the emphasis on following capacity rather than growth at all costs, addressing the issue of burnout among women.

Choices and Future Impact

The increasing collaboration and gender equity policies being implemented in organizations around the world, the disparity in leadership roles in the travel industry, with women making up 60% of the workforce but holding less than 8% of executive positions.

Women-Led Businesses and Their Impact

The impact of women-led busines

Dolores Semeraro is a sought-after international tourism keynote speaker and sustainable tourism marketing professional.

Dolores actively works in the tourism and travel conference space as a keynote speaker and moderator, gracing the stages of international tourism summits and trade shows.

As a professional keynote speaker, Dolores’ speaking topics encompass sustainable digital marketing for the tourism industry, how to establish digital mastery, and learn how to identify today’s traveler’s needs.

During the pandemic, Dolores launched her podcast show named ‘Truth Behind Travel Podcast’ where she regularly interviews tourism and travel industry leaders and representatives on how to rebuild the future of travel.

In the recent years, Dolores has continued to work and live on beautiful islands such as Mauritius, where she started her tourism and hospitality marketing consultancy working closely with the Mauritian luxury hospitality sector as corporate trainer.

According to her international clients, Dolores is a gifted trainer and intuitive workshop facilitator.

She is now based in Europe where she actively works as keynote speaker and corporate trainer in the tourism industry.

www.doloressemeraro.com

dolores@doloressemeraro.com

Instagram @dolores_semeraro

LinkedIn @dolores.sem

Dolores Semeraro:

Welcome back to the show, and welcome Iris. Finally, I have you on the podcast. I've heard so much about you. You've been recommended as a guest on a podcast. Happy to have you. How are you?

Iris Serbanescu:

Thank you. I'm so thrilled to be here.

Dolores Semeraro:

I think we're going to touch on quite a few hard points on on the conversation related to the role of women in business, especially in the tourism and travel industry, the experience you've had across the network that you've built with women's work. But before we get there, I do have a few questions to ask, and I would love to hear from you firsthand. Give us a journey summary of you know, your professional path, your personal path, if you feel like sharing and what took you to where you are today.

Iris Serbanescu:

I did not intend on setting out into a career in tourism when I first graduated from school. I think tourism is one of those overlooked industries that people don't necessarily realize how much breadth of opportunity there is, and that it's actually a massive sector, but we're not taught that tourism is an option, at least here in North America, I think in Italy or Europe, it's a little bit different. But I graduated from business school and went straight into a job on the Canadian equivalent of Wall Street on Bay Street in risk management consulting, which was just as exciting as it sounds. It was an interesting foray into the working world. And I quickly realized that after spending a semester of my university in Paris, travel was actually the thing that lit me up the most, and I wanted to see if I could turn it into a career. And I boldly left that job, that cushy job in finance and insurance, to work in travel and go back to school and get a tourism management diploma before figuring out exactly what the opportunities were. So that was about 12 years ago. I've now been in the industry for 12 years. I've moved through different roles. Most of them have been in marketing and partnerships. That's really where I thrive. I love creating connections for folks. I love the network effect, you know, applying some of that strategic business knowledge that I gained through my early career to companies in the travel industry. So I started in at a luxury agency and a virtuoso agency based in Toronto, progressed into working for a representation company for five years, which is where I built the bulk of my connections in the travel industry. And it was a great way to get out on on the road, to go to trade shows to understand the different facets of the industry and who the key players were, and the actual business behind our amazing industry, which people see almost as a Broadway show. It's like you see the as a traveler, you see the show, and you're part of the show, but you have no idea what goes on behind the scenes and how much of our industry is powered by sales, business, partnerships, operations, like understanding how to deliver experiences that whole side of the industry really fascinated me. So did that, yeah, for about five, six years. Then I moved into travel technology and worked for a large OTA. Got to really see that side of the industry, of like, venture capital backed companies and quick, hyper growth and scalability. Yeah, what it meant to, like, package a tourism product and put it on online to distribute around the world. I hadn't worked in an in a space that had that much scale before. So that was a really interesting you know, I was used to working with small businesses, and so that was a really interesting shift for me in my career. And after working there for three years through the pandemic, I went on to start my own business, women's work, which is now an award winning tourism accelerator for women entrepreneurs in travel, women and non binary entrepreneurs. I was one of those ideas that came to me during a quiet moment in the pandemic, when we were all looking around the industry to think about how we could build back better. And I was kind of in problem solving mode, like, what are the things that I see here that need to change, and based on my own experience what what needs to change? So it's sort of combination of my own lived experience in the industry, as well as how I could support the industry in growing back better, because I knew I wanted to stick around tourism despite the pandemic having a very like an awful effect on our industry, I knew it would come back. I knew it would bounce back. So people thought it was crazy that I started a business in the pandemic, but it's actually the best time, best time for opportunities like that.

Dolores Semeraro:

Where do you it see now? So you know, if you look back and you look at all the women that and really the people that have participated and gave you feedback into building this business, and you look at the way you've helped everyone that was either joining the network or crossing path or even just networking with you, and you've you must have observed their roles, their position at the time, and I completely agree with you when I saw some other businesses, even the even this podcast, started during the pandemic, at the point where people were not communicating, we're not meeting, we're not coming together within the industry. I started a podcast to have someone to have a platform for people to share, and that platform then became a vessel of voices, a vessel of resilience, of strength, of innovation. And I love that we keep having these voices on the podcast when I came across your profile, and I thought you must have seen firsthand, you must have witnessed a number of roles within the women led businesses in travels and travel and tourism, and many seeking support or needing help. So if you look at where we are as women in the travel and tourism industry. I'm curious to know it. Where do you see us being right now? Are we building? Are we thriving, or are we just getting by?

Iris Serbanescu:

Good question, okay, well, I have to preface this with the fact that I'm an eternal optimist, so I'm gonna say we're thriving where we are right now as a society, and where we are in our industry, and every industry really has been based on a series of decisions that we made over the last, you know, decades prior, like 80 years. So what I see now is things are changing really quickly, despite the fact that systemic change in terms of gender equality and gender equity take a long time to shift. There's a lot of like optimism. There's never been a better time for women to take on their own ventures. We do get more support now despite you know, we still live in a patriarchal, capitalistic society, but I'm still seeing how much the changes that we're making now are going to impact us in 20 years, like the businesses that are starting now, the types of equity, equitable systems that are being shifted now, we're going to reap the rewards of that later. So I think that there's, even though it's not perfect yet, there's a lot that's happening on the building front that's going to bode very well for all of us. Because, you know, women being in power is better for everyone, not just for women. There's a lot of stats around how women led businesses tend to do outperform male led businesses in many industries, especially in as well as in tourism. So I am seeing that we're building, we're thriving. I'm seeing like, amazing companies, like, greet her, NaVi savvy, some of these, like, very quickly growing technology companies are finding market niches and just going after it. One thing I just want to say about this topic, though, is in the process of building, there is more of an emphasis on following our capacity instead of following our desire to have growth at all costs. And what I mean by that is that, you know, burnout has been a really big topic of discussion since the pandemic, there's a McKinsey study that shows that women have experienced burnout at double the rate than men since the pandemic. And so there's this refocus on building a business with intention, and that also suits our not only our desires, but also our capacity for taking on that growth. There's a burden of unpaid labor that women have to do around the house. Don't not that they have to, but there's this expectation and the conditioning of women in society is that they do take on more of the unpaid labor, invisible labor, they call it. And so burnout is accelerating amongst women, and we're just becoming much more aware of boundaries and creating ventures that align with our lives, and not just, you know, that idea of growth, growth, growth, growth, growth.

Dolores Semeraro:

You just mentioned earlier about the choices that we're making today and the benefits of it, we will only rip them later on or in 20 years, what kind of choices are those?

Iris Serbanescu:

The choice for people to start elevating like to be allies, to women, to people of color, to folks in the industry that are underrepresented, that desire positions of power and that want to grow in the ways that they want to grow. Know, they there needs to be some sort of like allyship and mentorship in place in order to beat the systemic factors that have and barriers that they experienced up until now. So I'm noticing there's a lot more collaboration happening. There are a lot more, you know, gender equity policies being put in place in organizations. There's people are deconstructing that stereotype, those stereotypes and biases in the hiring processes that have again gotten us to the point where, like there are, there's a disparity of leadership being overwhelmingly male and not not as much female in organizations. So all of these things that we're doing now, like we will see, we will see the rewards sooner than 20 years. But to actually witness a big shift, it's going to take time, and it's going to take a mindset like it's an entire societal paradigm shift that needs to kind of happen in order for things to change. In my opinion, it's what I'm seeing.

Dolores Semeraro:

if you look at the tourism industry, specifically the travel industry, I have observed, especially in my work with tourism boards, that the leadership team is always male dominated, and then the doers, the actual, you know, the sales girls, the the marketing people, they are always women led. So I see a disparity. What kind of where do you see in your experience? Where, where have you seen that disparity happening? Is it, is it in the leadership level, or it's just spread across, and what kind of role do not have that alignment?

Iris Serbanescu:

Well, you're absolutely right. The statistic is that the workforce is 60% female in the industry, but less than 8% of executive positions are held by women in the travel industry. So that's the math behind that. The odds of a woman becoming CEO in travel are is one in every 20 men. So that's like 20 to one odds of a woman climbing the ranks. And I don't say this from like a victim standpoint, like this is just the data. And again, like the decisions that we've made up until now have gotten us here, but I think we're going to we're making, we're choosing differently now as a society, and we're noticing the barriers that are leading to this gender gap and this disparity, and because when people, when folks, enter the workforce, there is data behind this that it's fairly equal men and women on, you know, the their entry level positions when they enter the workforce at a younger age, then as we get further and further, you know, have opportunities to climb the corporate ladder, so to speak. It tends to then become unbalanced, and there are a lot of reasons for that that we can get into, if a little bit later on in this conversation. But I'm really, you're we really see that disparity, as you said, from the front line service based, kind of like lower paid roles to the top, and there are, to be fair in travel, there are quite a few women in senior management and middle management. But again, the money and power, uh, is disproportionately allocated, very disproportionately allocated. If less than 8% of board positions are held by women,

Dolores Semeraro:

is it just me, or do I sense that if I look at the travel industry, women with CEO title are self are CEO and founder of that company, rather than being CEO as an appointed, valuable, you know, Leading person in the organization,

Iris Serbanescu:

100% the society that we the societal structures, the nine to five world, the requirements of being a CEO at a larger corporation are less appealing and less accessible to women, and so they're kind of forced to go and start their own businesses if they want that CEO title. I mean, that was the case for many women who've gone through my program. They're like, we want to take the power back, like we don't want to wait 2010, years to get into the appointed CEO position and then face potential discrimination and harassment and all the things that come with, you know, being more visible, we're gonna just take matters into our own hands and start our own businesses. And so it's kind of, it's a good thing, but it's also like, we don't necessarily choose that. We choose that because the way that the world is set up, it's not set up for women to who have to do a lot of, again, the invisible labor or or that's you. Know, the power disparity there. It's not set up for them to succeed, like the nine to five world and the which I think is changing because of the pandemic, but the, you know, networking opportunities on the golf course, things like that, that are predominantly more accessible to men, those types of opportunities. We just we, we need to create our we need to create our own paths. In many ways, it's, it's like there's a difference between fighting upstream and then, just like trailblazing your own path. And I think women are just choosing to go ahead and create their own equity, sorry, their own business that has their own equity.

Dolores Semeraro:

Instead of working for somebody else, it's harder, I would say, to come in as a woman, as a woman leading a team, and change a company culture that you didn't create, but you're just kind of like bringing in a little bit of a little bit of oxygen and a little bit of new, fresh set of ideas, rather than doing your own thing, creating your own culture. But I argue whether that's equally it is effective, but I argue if that's the solution, or if that's what we need to praise, because then I think, in time, it creates separation. We don't want to create separation. In fact, we want to create cohesion on the workplace. And when I see women led businesses, yes, with a whole, you know, set of values and company culture and vision and purpose, commendable, absolutely. But I'm all for coming together, rather than, you know, separating, separating path. And when I see the tourism and travel industry, I see now a separation sort of pattern, so to speak. Do you see women led businesses having a longer and most sort of impactful, meaningful, you know, footprint in the future of tourism? Are these businesses, the businesses that everyone else is going to be learning from, they're going to, you know, shape the so called Future of tourism and having more impact in just out of your, you know, spectrum of witnessing so many women coming under the framework of women's work?

Iris Serbanescu:

yes, for two reasons. Okay, so there's a lot of data on this that's come out over the last few years, so, but then I'll also anecdotally share my own experience women who like female like women owned businesses, female tourism entrepreneurs generally tend to make choices that are more aligned with things like The United Nations sustainability, Sustainable Development Goals, the SDGs, it's in our nature to think about the collective rather than individually ourselves, and to prioritize collaboration over competition, and to be mindful of our connection with Nature and all of these things lead women business owners to make more climate aligned decisions. There's, it's a really interesting topic. They do things that are better for the environment. They're generally just more interested in regenerative practices than in growth at all costs, and they're in, you know, that's not this idea of control, and we need to, like, control the environment and control our businesses. It's more like there's just a more symbiotic relationship between the way women think and Mother Nature. And so that's going to be that's going to change the way that they run their businesses. There's a reason Mother Nature is female. It's not father nature. So, um, I like that. The data backs this up. First of all, it's not just my own experience, but in in women's work, in in my accelerator program, we talk about building your business on anti oppressive and regenerative tourism principles in general, and that's one of our workshop topics. And we also discuss cyclical living. So women live in cycles, 28 day cycles, and men don't have a cycle. So there's that difference as well, where, like we have to shift and adapt based on where we are at any point in the month, our Then there's also the idea that if 85% of the purchase decisions energy levels are different, our you know, emotions are in travel are made by women, wouldn't you want a woman who's making the decisions and running the business to make the different, and it's a we take a different approach to business business most viable as possible? It's just like the as a result, if we don't. That, then we burn out. And I've company has to align itself with its market. You have to understand your market, and there's no better way than really noticed that when we can align ourselves with like our having the same lived experience as the customer. So or not the monthly cycles, cycles of nature, building our businesses same. No one's lived experience is the same, but as a woman, we just have distinct lived experience over a man. So it's in a way that is like a regenerative spiral like this, an interesting it's, it's, yeah, it's an interesting topic to instead of a straight line upwards, it's just more dive into. I could talk about, you know, cyclical, living and beneficial and more sustainable for everybody involved. regenerative business forever, but those topics are just much more appealing and relevant to women.

Dolores Semeraro:

I do understand that it really impacts the energy levels and the intention, the clarity, the vision. And this must be one of the key topics, also across the the work that you do with women's work. And I want to know, just to begin with, like, what propelled you to create women's work? Why? Why creating a system of supporting I don't know even how to if it's a framework, if it's, if it's, it's really just holding the hands of women around the world and having them holding each other's hands. And I find this so amazing and so important because it's so rare. So where, where did it all get started?

Iris Serbanescu:

Um, I started this based on my own experience as a woman in the travel industry, and my own experience as a woman who wanted to start her own business and noticed all of the barriers that were coming up internally. I've been employed for I had been employed for, you know, nine years at this point, and I knew I wanted to start a company in travel, but I wasn't sure what exactly I would do and how I would help the industry build back better again. That was really important to me. I started reflecting on like, Okay, what does the industry need? What do I need? And you know our biggest Well, you don't necessarily know, but our biggest motivator can be turning our pain into purpose. And I struggled in different ways throughout my career as a woman as also as a woman as part of the LGBTQ plus community. I identify as bisexual, and that was a really challenging place to be. You know, 15 years ago now it's totally changed. Thankfully, society is moving in the right direction, but I experienced discrimination, harassment, barriers, woman to woman, bullying. You know, I'd have female bosses who wouldn't be would be seeing like competition over collaboration, and all of these things just didn't feel they didn't sit well with me, and I wanted to take my lived experience and create something where we could thrive. And what we need to thrive as entrepreneurs is support, you know, validation, collaboration, understanding, when we have all of these ingredients in place. It's not so much about the tactical pieces of how you grow a business. There are obviously lots of things you need to do to launch a business and grow a business, and you don't know what you don't know. So you come somewhere for knowledge. But what inspired me to create women's work was it wasn't just another business program or business accelerator. It was this safe space, this container where we could come and show up as our full selves, that something that never existed for me in the industry, and navigate the fear and self doubt and lack of confidence and share our lived experiences as a kind of a kind of a cathartic way to move through barriers to realize our highest potential. So that's really why I wanted to create the space, because I needed this space, and I figured if I needed it, and the more women I talked to, I found out they needed it too, even though I was filled with imposter syndrome at the very beginning, I needed to take this leap.

Dolores Semeraro:

And how did it go?

Iris Serbanescu:

Well, three years, five cohorts, almost 60 entrepreneur graduates later, and say it's pretty good.

Dolores Semeraro:

What is the kind of support that you see as a pattern that is. Often needed?

Iris Serbanescu:

I notice over the past three years, the most helpful piece of support we've been able to offer has been reflecting back to the participants in the program that they can trust their intuition and that they're on the right path. It's not about giving them the answers, unless you know they need very tactical support. It's more about like, Oh, this is what your intuition is saying. Let's dive into that a little bit. And how might this be the right move for you? Whether it's bringing on a co founder, breaking up with a co founder, launching a new product, pricing, like all these things, we have a lot of the answers inside of us, but we're just so taught to look externally that if we continue to teach people to look externally, they'll never be able to trust their own intuition and guidance. And that's why I like to share about women's work being a an investment in the foundation of being an entrepreneur. So it's not like you get all the answers for 12 weeks and then you're, you're on your own and you don't know what you're doing. It's like we're setting up the foundation for you to trust yourself, essentially. And we do that differently with different people. It's, it's a really co creative, symbiotic process. And there's also, of course, the more tactical pieces, like networking, introducing them to people that can help grow their businesses that they wouldn't otherwise have access to. So some, some allyship in that way, bringing in people from my network that I've built relationships with over the last 10 years, and introducing them to these startups. So yeah, networking, mentorship, allyship and just guidance on the fact that they can follow their intuition.

Dolores Semeraro:

You've recognized a niche, a niche into the niche, the niche of women working in travel and tourism, and in that niche, the niche of those in there at the beginning of their entrepreneurial journey, recognizing and admitting, because not everyone admits that they need support. And admitting to need to be needed support, and in that niche, you've built a network that then merges with your network so everything seems very actual. It's now. It's happening. Now. It's needed now. How are you going to future proof women's work?

Iris Serbanescu:

Because it's so in the now I am like extremely the way I've built the business is that it needs to be extremely responsive to what the needs of the moment are. So we have changed the curriculum every single time we've run this program. We've never run it the same every time we look at who's in the program, and we build our curriculum based on what their needs are. We have like the basics, basic topics, but then we bring on different experts in different fields, constantly researching who's at the top of their game in this area and bringing them in to speak. We pay all of our speakers, we pay all of our mentors, so it's not a volunteer opportunity. So we can be really choosy with who we bring in. So I think just continuing to like be present enough to be in that space to respond instead of react, and just like build from that co creative space is going to help. And the idea also that, I mean, we launched during the pandemic. So we're pretty used to like changing things quickly on the fly. We soon realized that the amount of hours that people had during the pandemic to dedicate towards women's work was like it was actually because no one was traveling. They had way more time to be online. But then when things came back to normal, the amount of hours that we had scheduled for this program and people were on the road, it was impossible. So we had to now, we had to completely shift how we do it and do like, pre recorded workshops for half of them instead of live. And so we're just like constantly changing. But I would say the biggest way to future proof for me is like continuing to focus on regenerative principles, continuing to solve for burnout, because that's just going to keep going. And you know, you can never solve for the problem, but just keeping in mind the idea that we want to build within our capacity and not over commit and overstretch ourselves, whatever the trends are in terms of how people are growing their businesses, we take all of those things into account. And I don't want to say burnout is a trend. It's absolutely not. It's just a topic of discussion that's gotten much more air time than it ever has in the past. And so how can we not contribute to that problem by educating people and listening to their capacity, which is like a very difficult thing to do. I myself have suffered from burnout twice in the last three years while building women's work, and so that's why I'm really passionate about about this topic.

Dolores Semeraro:

And if you were to leave a word of wisdom to those listening to the podcast, perhaps at. The beginning of their entrepreneurial journey in travel and tourism, or at the crossroad of a potential career advancement or a choice. What would you say?

Iris Serbanescu:

To be more excited about the opportunity than about the barriers. That has been the key. My excitement has taken me on so many journeys that I would have given up on if they if the excitement wasn't greater than all the barriers I had to face so continuously aligning yourself with your mission and with your why and your vision.

Dolores Semeraro:

Thank you so much, Iris. This has been a wonderful conversation. I think that we just really scrapped the surface of many of the things we touched on today. If you feel that there is a story that needs to be told, and you think about the podcast being a channel for that, open doors anytime.

Iris Serbanescu:

Thank you so much that that truly means the world, because this kind of exposure could make a huge difference for a small business

Dolores Semeraro:

all the best for the work ahead. And thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Iris Serbanescu:

Thank you. This was a wonderful conversation.