HospitableMe, Behind Booking.com's Award-Winning Travel Proud, Launches Seven Secrets of Inclusive Hospitality

A universal, research-grounded curriculum for welcoming every guest — built for hospitality, retail, and healthcare organizations at any scale.

HospitableMe, the inclusion education company behind Booking.com's Travel Proud program, has launched the Seven Secrets of Inclusive Hospitality — a subscription-based curriculum designed to give hospitality, retail, and healthcare organizations a practical system for delivering inclusive guest experiences at scale.

Seven Secrets is available in four formats: asynchronous self-paced learning, live facilitated sessions, white-label (fully branded as the client's own program), and train-the-trainer. Annual subscribers also gain access to the HospitableMe Collective, a curated bench of expert practitioners available for deeper organizational work.

HospitableMe developed and operates the curriculum behind Booking.com's Travel Proud program, which has been adopted by more than 135,000 properties across 150 countries and territories in 11 languages. Travel Proud won a 2025 Skift IDEA Award, the travel industry's most prestigious recognition for innovation. Seven Secrets represents the next chapter: a broader curriculum built on new proprietary research, designed for any organization where people serve people.

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The Research Behind the Framework

To build Seven Secrets, HospitableMe conducted hundreds of in-depth interviews with travelers across 17 identity factors, traits, and conditions — including disability, race, gender, age, body size, neurodiversity, religion, health status, and relationship status.

The research revealed something the team did not expect. The challenges travelers described varied widely by identity, but the underlying feelings of exclusion were remarkably consistent.

Across every group, what people wanted was to feel understood, respected, and supported — and to sense that the people serving them were genuinely on their side.

Seven Secrets was reverse-engineered from that insight.

"Hospitality has always been rooted in empathy — but we've treated it as intangible, something you either have or you don't. We've learned that empathy can be cultivated, practiced, and embedded in how people work. Seven Secrets gives teams the language and the tools to actually do that."

— Billy Kolber, Co-Founder, HospitableMe

Seven Universal Principles

The curriculum is organized around seven universal principles — including Reject Preconceptions, Be Curious, Honor Autonomy, and the framework's cornerstone, Team Guest — designed to be learned and applied by anyone, regardless of their prior knowledge of specific identity groups.

"Team Guest" reflects what HospitableMe's research found at the core of every positive experience: more than accommodations or fixes, guests need to feel that the people serving them are genuinely on their side.

The HospitableMe Collective

Seven Secrets subscribers also gain access to the HospitableMe Collective — a curated group of recognized thought leaders and practitioners who bring lived expertise alongside professional credentials across disability, race, gender, neurodiversity, body size, age, and beyond.

When an organization needs to go deeper than the Seven Secrets curriculum — specialized training, executive advisory, content development, or keynote presentations — the Collective delivers, giving organizations access to world-class inclusion expertise without the overhead of building it in-house.

Current Collective partners include Martinique Lewis, Neha Arora, Danny Guerrero, Kara Richardson Whitely, Gabrielle Claiborne, Kristy Durso, John Sage, Monika Bielskyte, Masa Gong, Catarina Rivera, and Zoe Moore.

Notes to editors: Interview opportunities with Billy Kolber and Kenny Porpora available upon request. High-resolution logos and headshots available.