We Are Family: Kari Payne and Scott Bishop Falcone on LGBTQ+ Family Travel
Nobody tells you about the math.
Not the money math. The other math.
Navigating the Unspoken Safety Math
The one where you're standing in a hotel lobby with your kids, scanning the room, calculating how visible you are. Whether the front desk person clocked your family structure. Whether this is going to be one of the easy places or one of the hard ones.
Kari Payne and Scott Bishop Falcone know that math by heart.
In this episode, two of the most thoughtful voices in LGBTQ+ family travel get into what it actually looks like to navigate the world with kids when your family doesn't match the one in the brochure.
Not the sanitized version. The real one.
The destinations that genuinely welcome queer families — not just tolerate them with a tight smile…
The ones that sound welcoming until you arrive and realize the welcome was for a different kind of family…
How to have age-appropriate conversations with your kids about safety and identity while traveling — without scaring them or lying to them…
And the moments — because there will be moments — when the world reminds you that your family is still considered political in some places. Even at a beach resort. Even on a Tuesday.
We also get into the practical stuff. How to research destinations as a queer family. What questions to ask before you book. What to do when something goes wrong.
Kari and Scott bring warmth, humor, and the kind of hard-won wisdom you only get from actually doing this — not theorizing about it.
Whether you're a queer parent, planning to be, or traveling with chosen family… this conversation doesn't get nearly enough airtime.
And your family deserves better than a brochure that wasn't made for you.
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We Are Family: Kari Payne and Scott Bishop Falcone on LGBTQ+ Family Travel with Kari Payne & Scott Bishop Falcone
Creating Unapologetic Safe Spaces
Meet Kari Payne and Scott Bishop Falcone. I love the accent. Two theater kids from LA who turned their college friendship into a travel revolution called Better Angels Travel, collecting nearly 30 passport stamps between them. Such collectors as they are, they had an awakening. The travel industry needed more than just rainbow flags during Pride Month. It needed tours where LGBTQ plus families get to go completely unapologetically for themselves.
Now, combining Kari's family-first approach to get two amazing kids with Scott's fabulous flair, sparked by a life-changing European tour with a trans person and their supportive family, to create travel experiences that are as diverse and as joyful as the community itself. This is probably no matter unleashed with Kari and Scott, where inclusive travel gets its wings, and everyone's invited to fly. How's that?
That's awesome. Is that all from AI?
Yes.
Let's just put our brains on the shelf, I guess.
We have some pretty cool gas tools.
That was awesome. We have got to get a copy of that.
Yes, of course. Let me tell you, that was multiple thousands of dollars that we invested in that, but it's damn good. It’s better than I do. It's really good. We have been having a whole lot of fun with it. It's pretty awesome. Let's jump in and play because we're off to a fabulous start with my first show three ways. It's very exciting for me.
This is your first three ways.
I have been a virgin. What can I tell you? Not my first rodeo in terms of online stuff. Certainly in this vernacular, it is that. Let's talk about this whole adventure. How did you guys first meet, by the way?
I'll tell the story, because my memory for the things of the past might be a little.
This is the game now, or the Newlywed Game?
It almost was that. It was a field romance. We met in college. We were both in two of the same circles. We were both in the drama department. We were also a part of an extracurricular club outside of studies in the Greek world. We obviously connected because we were all mutual friends, but then we were in a class together. I had heard about him for the whole time. When I was a freshman, he was away in Italy.
That whole year, because I was a drama major and there were not a lot of drama majors in our group, they were like, “You have to meet him.” You guys, everyone had us married already. I'm like, “I have never had him.” We did meet, and we ended up having a drama class together, so we were spending a lot of time together, and it was kismet. We were both from LA, so we had that connection. Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf from?
You can imagine how theater majors in that boorah social context, Greek life. We were outsiders even at the time, and we did not quite know how outsider we were. I was not willing to face how much of an outsider I really was for a while. It took a while to embrace the fabulousness of her outsiderness.
Is it just for those of us who do not understand, including me, what Greek life means?
Returning to sorority load.
That's what I was thinking, but there are all sorts of other meanings that could go along with that. I just was not sure. How did this evolve into a whole travel business?
There was a long lag between graduating from college and our reconnection. In the course of that lag, I properly came out, and I came into myself, and I took a long time to know how and with whom I could reconnect from that old social life. Kari always stuck in my head because I really felt like I had found my people with her. That gamble turned out to be okay because when it came along, I told her there was something that I would like to tell you about, and in the process I was introducing her to my long-term partner and my rather eccentric practices of life. She was totally accepting of it. Integrated me into her life as she was starting. It was actually coinciding more with her beginning her new life with her current husband. You want to take over the next part of it, or shall I go?
That's a good synopsis of, after school, we had left and had pursued very different careers, neither really being in the theater world anymore, but both in travel. Scott went on to I do not remember how many years after you have been with. I do not know if we want to mention the company you work with.
I want to refer to it as a big fancy flex tour brand.
Travel is a political act. Stepping out into the world with confidence builds a borderless future for our community.
He works. He's been with them for about eighteen years. I feel like it's got to be pretty close to one of your, while you were in academia for a bit. He's a tour director with this company, majors in Italy, but has also done Ireland, Croatia, and Japan. I went into more of a nonprofit travel with a purpose industry. I was coordinating groups of volunteers going either to places in the US or mostly overseas, and doing a variety of different types of strategies for a faith-based nonprofit. We have had this extensive experience of leading tours and leading groups of people and understanding those dynamics, everything from the logistics to how do you get people to get along.
There was just a spark of like, “We could be doing this.” I'm in LA. I'm based in LA. My kids go to a school in Beverly Hills, and every day there are throngs of tourists coming through Beverly Hills. I'm just like, “When you live in a city, you do not think, this is a tourist destination.” You're like, “This is just traffic.” People that were traveling right here to my city, I thought, “We could do this, and I hope we can do it better than anybody else.” We started talking, and both had these thoughts of, is there a place where families that have members of the LGBT community can travel and get an amazing experience for wherever they're going, but it can be a little bit more than that because they get to travel with other families that are in similar situations and they can bring their allies.
Bridging Intergenerational Pride Connection
I'll let Scott talk about his experience with a trans guest. For me, I think about what about parents who are not members of the LGBTQ community, but they have kids that are coming out and identifying as that. Maybe the parents are like, “I want to be able to support my kid. I want to be able to understand their world a little bit more and what can I do?” I have a personal friend whose son came out as trans in the past few years.
Just navigating that space with them. It's like, what else can we do to let him know how much we support him? We want to get an opportunity to see the world the way he sees the world. This idea that, like, travel can do that. It does that literally because you go into someone else's community and experience a different place. What about just the people that you're with who are literally having a different experience of the world than you do on a daily basis? We are going to do that together.
That's where, for me, I came at it from that perspective. The parent, what could I do? A little thing that I could do. We're going to go on vacation. The kids want to go to Disneyland. They want to go surfing lessons in Santa Monica. We want to do all that fun stuff as a family. What if it had a little bit more to it than that? It could be transformative rather than just being transient in another city.
That's really cool. For people who do not know, because it was really a getting-to-know-you situation, you're doing tours primarily of California or specific parts of California. Give us the background.
Add my little part of that evolution. It's a really exciting thing. Everything starts to hang together in this process when Kari sees the approaches unloading things there. There's Golden Hollywood Hills, and she has this wonderful experience with Kathryn's son Ashton, who transitioned. At the same time, I am coming home, and I spend six months of the year away from home, and I want to be based in California. I want to have a life where I can be a little bit more predictable at home with my husband and with my community. At the same time, we're having these conversations when I had this trans guest.
It was a fifteen-year-old boy whose family was 1,000% supportive, traveled with mom, stepdad, siblings, an aunt, and a grandmother. The mom came up and said, “You saw the name on the registration. You were to ignore that.” I said, “Cool.” They used a pronoun that I should know about. He hummed. I said, “Should I like one of the boys or is he like his own space?” He said, “One of the boys.” It was fabulous. At the end of the experience, the family said, what would we have done if it was somebody who was less prepared or less easy with the whole situation? I thought, “You should not have to do that.”
I have a great partner back in LA that can achieve all these goals. I can be back at home, can find my own people properly, and we can specialize in this. It's something that is challenging, exciting, and new. It's not an Atlantis cruise, and it's not the country club family experience that I've been leading. It's a possibility to expand the travel market to people who really deserve it, whether the excitement or the safety or anything else associated with my level of vacation that I offer my job.
Are you basically targeting the trans community as the exclusive client of yours?
When I say the Atlantis crew, what I'm saying is that we're hoping to grab the same gay and lesbian folk and bisexual folk who go on vacations for themselves, but that they're wanting to go with another generation, to have an intergenerational, not so kinky, very much more prideful and exciting and glam. We do want those traditional LGBT families that are headed by gay and lesbian trans people to be aware that the emerging generation is LGBTQ, but very trans. That was what I actually have seen evidence of. This is what I see with the younger communities. They are just in a different place. It's an exciting community to get to know.
It's interesting for me because I'm from a different generation. Certainly, I was at the Whistler Gay Ski Week recently. The terminology we're vintage.
Totally.
I'm typically the oldest person in the room, although at that event I was not, which was interesting. It's funny because I'm in Miami right now at my mom's condo. I'm going to go to Wilton Manors to go out periodically. I used to live in Fort Lauderdale back in the day when everyone was young. I go there now, I'm like, “I'm once old, what happened? Can you roll too?”
What do old people do around me?
Exactly. I'm 35 years old. The point is, I'm still learning, and all the kids that have different experiences certainly have not been through. Most of them have not been through the gauntlet that we of age have been through. The term queer, I was talking about this with my mom the other day. My mom's 90. She's like, I do not like that word, Mama. I do not like that word either. That was not a good word back in my day. It's a celebration of PR. Now it's in some of our marketing. I'm happy to get used to that and learn that. I try from the trend standpoint. Years ago, this is just so funny.
Years ago, when I was teaching real estate investors, I have been speaking for 40-plus years. I did an event in Atlanta for real estate investors. I was up there like every couple of weeks at the Sheraton Midtown, which is now, was the W, and now it's something else. The hotel warned me, said, “This weekend, we have this big event. You may not want to be here.” It's called Southern Comfort, which is the largest gathering. I'm not sure whether it was the world or the US, of people that are going through change. Trans, post-op, pre-op, cost dressers, and with their families and the doctors and vendors of clothing. It's a big deal and a real deal.
Choosing vetted, welcoming destinations ensures your family vacay is focused on joy rather than vigilance.
You get a booth at that, by the way. I was like, we're going. I had the best time with my audience, my real estate investor audience, leaning Republican, you get the idea. That is not to say that there are not wonderful Republicans. This is long before the disaster that we have now in the United States. Nonetheless, it was very interesting. The first thing I said to my class the next morning was, who came here to make a big change in your life? What we did do, and it was not my event. I was speaking, but I was speaking from another company.
I brought in some of the people that I had met and I talked to privately, and they did little talks outside the meeting room because I could not do it in my own room because it just was not really. We had whole new levels of acceptance, which was very cool. Having talked to this one woman outside of Southern Comfort is a guy. At Southern Comfort is a very well-dressed woman with a hat, and he brought her, his her, because you cannot really tell anymore, the kid and the wife. The biggest courageous thing was to tell his father what he was doing, because that's a lot to do.
The courage that those people had was a huge shift for me. People need to get that. What you're doing with travel, Rick Steve said this before the last presidential election, is that travel really promotes peace because it promotes understanding what other people are doing and going through. What you're doing is so super important. Since I'm a bit confused, would you get what the f*** it is that you guys do and how you do it so that we. That's a technical term by the way, so that we can, our audience can understand and get a better handle on, say, “Yes, I have got to be on their tours because they're freaking amazing.”
I love that story that you just shared because of the sense of like, these two worlds are converging, and typically we go, “You guys just do your thing. We'll just do our thing over here.” The spirit is that we, like, we can do these things together. We actually have a better time and a more enriching experience when we're together. Again, that’s part of the spirit behind what we want to do. Essentially, we are curating guided escorted tours. It's a tour. It's not just a package. It's not just a vacation package.
It's a fully escorted tour. From the time you land at the hotel to the time you're about to take off to go back home or on your onward journey, you're with us. We're hosting you. We've arranged incredible experiences at restaurants. We've already booked some amazing hotels that are going above and beyond to guarantee us ocean-view rooms in Santa Monica and some other special perks along the way. We have had three nights in Santa Monica, three nights in Long Beach at a hotel that's right on the waterfront. Listen, I grew up in LA. I was born in Hollywood, raised in the city.
I did not know that this area even existed in Long Beach. You are on the waterfront, down from the Queen Mary. It's just this magical little corner that is so cool. That's where we're staying for the second half of the trip. We have special narration. Obviously, Scott is our tour director. We're locals. We grew up in town, so you're going to get all the insights that you might not get from Star Tours. That's literally the name of one of these buses that drives you around. You're going to hit all the things that you want to do on your family vacation in LA. You're just going to have this prideful twist.
Our first tour, so our signature tour is what we're calling We Are Family. It's in Los Angeles during Pride month. You have a day at Disneyland. I have to say, last year I went to Disney during Pride. It was not like Pride week in LA, but the whole month of Pride, Disney is rainbow central. It is awesome. I was so impressed. I took my kids, and I was like, “Let's check it out.” How can Disney do Pride?” It probably fits differently for someone who's in the LGBT community, but I thought, this feels so inclusive. This feels like, “What I like is seen.” Of course, Disney knows how to merchandise, so you're going to find things, pride merch that you will not be able to find in other places outside of the park.
Designing Balanced Escorted Itineraries
There are exclusive things like that. It was awesome. That's a part of our week. We try very hard to make sure that there's a balance. The other thing about traveling as a family is that everybody has different needs, everybody has different likes, and you want to make sure. This is true in my family. Like, “When I go on vacation, find a beach, I do not want to move, bring me in my time. That is my vacation.” My husband is like, “Here are the 50 things we have to see in the city, and we are going to do ten of them today, and that is it.” I am like, “Wait a minute, the kids cannot even manage one of those.”
The kids are asking, “Am I going to have fun?”
The kids have their own thing. We are mindful of that in the sense that we want to create balance. We want to offer activities for people who want to make. They want to do the most and get the most and have these incredible experiences. There are going to be parents that are like, “Can I just sit in a cabana at the pool and not think about anything?” My kids are going to have a good time. Maybe my kids are a group of them who can take care of themselves and do their own thing.
We want to make sure that there is a lot put into that as well so that nobody feels like I am on this vacation for somebody else’s. Does that make sense though? What we are saying, it is a fully escorted tour. Most of your meals are included. We have some really cool spots where we are together in terms of just dynamic views and really yummy food. There will be a balance of having some free time being on your own to explore certain areas. We are going to see Hollywood Boulevard and the Beverly Hills Rodeo Drive and check all the boxes.
Hang on one second. I want to clarify something. Primarily, the tour is bespoke. You have got a framework, but it is primarily for an individual or his or her family, or is it a small group tour?
We are expecting 24 maximum people. That means a community of different families, whatever they are. We have a couple of the grandmother and her granddaughter. We have a family of six. It can be a family of eight, and then we can have two families of eight. I call myself a travel director in my day job. I think of my job as a social alchemist, which means that the framework is already there. Everybody is excited to go to the studios. Everybody is excited to go to the lobster in Santa Monica. People are always staying together in the same hotel.
When we are in group meals, group welcome reception, little group activities, scavenger hunts here, or like a guided walking tour there. I am the one who is making sure that people know each other, people are keeping the mood light, people are not having to talk if they do not want to. One of the things that really impressed me, I went on a private tour in Vietnam and Cambodia where it was myself and my travel companion and we had a guide with us all the time and he was talking with us and he was informative and he was charming, it was interesting and wonderful, but I, as an extremely extroverted person, needed a little bit of downtime, a little bit of distance.
When you are traveling in a group, and you have a person of reference like myself, the travel director, or the local guide who is going to be showing you something specific at Disney or whatever, you do not want to constantly make conversation. You do not want to constantly have to be engaged with what your guide is doing. You want to just experience it and be able to observe from afar, or maybe you are a crazy expert. You want to ask all kinds of questions.
Group travel is mitigated by my role in that sense. It is something that you know that I guarantee these LGBTQ families' safety. These people who are there being protected, they are going to be on time, they are going to be focused on checking all those boxes, and being able to go home after a week and say, "I saw it all. I met awesome people from a different part of the country I did not know had awesome people like that. I really can say that I am going to LA and my kid wants to go to college in LA and I am okay with that. My other kid is talking about going to college with that, and that should be okay."
That is wonderful. It's funny because I am thinking about going back to this. Years ago, my mom and I took a one-week bus tour through Ireland. I have done that actually.
That's gorgeous.
What was that?
Was it CIE, the Irish national?
No, my mom booked it. My mom is a crazy travel person. She is 90 years old and stops. It's pretty amazing. Anyway, we get on this bus, and it turns out that the driver is lesbian. There are us. That was it. The rest of them are all straight people. Straight people are important. They make gay babies. They're important. Our allies, we love our allies, Kari, right? The problem was that, and we're seeing gorgeous, the cliffs of Mohore, Mottor, whatever, forget now, but it was stunning, but boring as hell. Typically, a straight group on a boat, they're bored. They're just, "Shoot us now."
A whole lot of A little bit skewed older in the age range, right?
Yes. A little bit. Not a lot, but still, yes. Anyway, long story short, Mom and I are like, she's pretty fun, she's renegade. I'm like, "Mom, we need to do a strip with gay guys and their moms." Exactly what you're doing.
We call it a dream for centuries.
I put it out to my list because I was like, this could be really fun. We ultimately did not do it. People will come back to me saying, "My mom's dead. I can still come." "Yes, I'm not gay. This will be fun. Can I come?” “Of course.” "Can I bring a friend?" “Of course, we want people that are fun and cool.” You're building that, and you're building that for Los Angeles, which I freaking.
We will collab on that together.
For real.
No, actually, and Scott has the contacts specifically for Ireland. We’re launching We Are Family this summer. June 22nd through the 28th is our first, like I said. That's our launch, our signature tour. We are developing for others. The way we have thought about it is that LA will be our base because I think there's always going to be a draw to be in LA for Pride and for many reasons. We want to be expansive, and we want to think about where other places are on our list. Just to give some examples, it's like a We Are Family New Orleans tour. Because of Scott and me, our personal connection and extensive experience in France and Italy.
Selecting Safe Excursion Destinations
France and We Are Family France and Italy. The idea is that we develop the core of what the tour is about, which is coming together, celebrating pride together, celebrating everybody wherever they're at. You have got a straight family, but you have got the gay uncle. Let's go on a We Are Family tour. Grandma wants to do something for the grandkids, let's go on We Are Family tour or, same sex parents want to do something with the kids where they can still be, but so heartbroken that some friends of ours that we're working with, they're a lesbian couple and they were like, "Yes, we went on this thing, but when we're with my family, we have to be buddies. We can be lovers."
Overcoming Systemic Exclusivity in Travel
When we're in that environment, we're like, "My BFF, I have a very close friend as well." Siblings ask him not to tell his nieces and nephews or to talk about his lifestyle. I'm like, "Who do they think your partner for ten years was?" Just, damn, was. It breaks my heart that these people, they're loved by their family, but they're not accepted. They're not really welcome to be 100% who you are in that space. That's what we're going to say. That's not what we're about. You're going to be 100%. Mom and mom can hold hands and be mom and mom and cute and lovey and gross to kids, because that's the way it's supposed to be. They do not have to think, "I just have to pretend we're good friends."
In the meantime, each traveling group will meet multiple configurations of this. They'll experience this immense burst of joy and freedom within the traveling community that we're creating, and then they'll go back to Florida, Indiana, Oregon, Utah, Fresno, and we'll feel empowered.
Supportive travel creates a bridge between generations, giving trans youth and their families a space to thrive together.
There's a piece to this too. Remember, we're the Pride Nomad community is a community of people that either are living the location-independent lifestyle or want to be. There's more I want to be than actually am. That giving people experience, whether it's LA or Tuscany, does not really matter necessarily. Yes, the location's important in terms of what we want to experience, but the experience is what matters. Having that level, and frankly, if I'm going to tour with you and we're having a blast and you're sending me back to Fresno, nothing wrong with Fresno. I've spoken to few times.
You mean FresYes?
FresYes, thank you. I love that. Great.
I know some people from there.
We have an amazing teacher, Luis, from Joe Burnett in that studio.
You just froze, and it's a very fascinating photo of you right now. It's just bizarre. He'll be back. I'm very big on language. I appreciate that, FresYes. That's great. My whole thinking is that there are so many people that when they go back to, let me like, get back into the room. Is that when they go back to a disempowering situation, they're more like this, "I am going to be a digital nomad again. I am going to be a pride nomad.
I am going to live my life, whether it be six months in the South of France or in Colombia or in West Hollywood or wherever that may be, it's time." There's no more of this BS, especially now. I'm trying to keep this not date-centric because this will live on forever with what we're recording here. In my world, I have no patience for people who are going to judge us for anything other than maybe the fact that color, that shirt, but that, no, but short of that.
Only Anna Wintour can get away with that.
She's paid for that. We get to riff on her. I have no tolerance for that. The community we're going to build is not going to allow that. I'll give you another piece to this, because we could go on forever, which seems to be every interview I do goes on forever with this, because we're just having way too much fun, which should be illegal, but it's not that luckily. The experience that you guys are solving, or probably guys are solving on a tour basis, we're looking to solve on a business basis. I was in an event recently in Orlando with 400 entrepreneurs, business owners, self-employed, mostly self-employed entrepreneurs.
It was a great, fabulous event about AI. It's how I picked up this stuff that I wrote. Of those 400 people that were there, three identified as LGBTQ. Only two were members of this group, one lesbian and I, and she said, "Please do not leave me." What was also bizarre about it was, and mind you, everyone was lovely, everyone was very nice, but there was more than one person in that room wearing a MAGA shirt. “No.”
We're creating our own mastermind. For that purpose, because I want it to be our room. I do not care whether you're gay or not. My friend Molly Mahoney is a huge ally. We did an interview with her a while back. Molly's fabulous. Her phone has rainbow flags all over the damn thing. I do not care whether you're gay, and I care that you love people, and that building a community where no one feels the least bit uncomfortable, where you can have your panache and play. You guys are a mixed marriage, right?
That's the beauty of all this. No one should give a F***, and same thing with what we talked about Southern Comfort a little bit ago. “I do not give a F*** what you're doing.” The fact that you are courageous enough to have the balls to tell your family who you really are. This is the only safe place that they can be during the entire year. A, that's really sad, but how courageous is that? Do I have that courage? Who knows? By the way, do I understand any of that? No. It's not part of my consciousness. Who am I to tell?
You can have empathy for it without being able to personalize the field.
How can I possibly understand what a trans person is or goes through? It's not me, but the fact is that you're doing that takes courage that I know I do not. What you're doing, I want to applaud you guys for doing it. It's super important. There it goes again.
Empowering Expat and Sovereign Lifestyles
I wanted to say a couple, just wanted to piggyback what you were saying about Rick Steves, who is, like, okay, long been my travel guru. He wrote a book called Travel as a Political Act. He focuses more on going places where we might categorise beings whose political systems are very different from ours. Within our own context, there is this sense that you can travel as this travels to places and in a way that creates the world that you want to see. That's also really core to what we want to be able to do. You have alluded to this, but the destination is not as important as the community.
Travel should empower queer families to explore the world unapologetically without hiding who they are.
That is the crux for us. That's why we're like, “We can take We Are Family to New Orleans, to Ireland, to France, to Italy, to Japan, to Australia.” All these places that I've been, and I want to take people. We can take it anywhere because what we're really doing is we're creating this community. Especially for families and for kids that feel very isolated, that feel like they live in a world that has nothing to do with who they are.
For them to get an experience, even if it's just a one-week vacation, and then go back and be like, “I met so-and-so who lives two states over, and they get where I'm coming from. They get the experience that we had together. There can be strength and power that is found in that. I think just by saying, “Regardless of the type of society the current administration is trying to create and impose on us, we're still going to make our own. We're still going to continue to do what works for us because, as far as I can tell, we still have that freedom at the very least.”
We're going to keep doing that together, and we want as many people to participate. As we said, it's not just about members of the LGBTQ community. It is about allyship. It's a very tricky water to navigate. Even Scott and I just had a conversation about this about what it means to be an ally. There's so much nuance that I do not get. I see something from one perspective that I have never heard, or I did not understand.
You have so many opportunities to work through and learn when you're in this type of environment. Maybe it's just a gesture. Maybe it's like, “Listen, I do not know if I am ever going to get really what's going on with this kid. I want to go on vacation. If this makes my grandson or my granddaughter or they feel like, at least grandma's trying.” She came, and she did Pride in LA. It can mean so much.
My mom did Pride in Tel Aviv years ago, and she called me and said, "You have got to come." I saw a show. I forgot she was in Miami. She saw a show called, I forget what it's called even now, but she's like, "Ken, you have got to see the show." It was a gay show. It was in San Francisco. Fabulous. That's the beauty of it. You're right, Kari, about allies. I think for some of us, certainly, because I've experienced this, if you're not gay, my concern is, how cool are you? How much can I mean to myself with you? Even with, like, even with you. It's like, “Wait, is she gay? Is she straight? Where am I in this? Am I going to be okay?
People who want to be allies have a lot to learn in that frame as well, because it's like, I do not know how much is out there about what it really means to be an ally. Does it just mean, “Do not ask, do not tell? Does not bother me.” Does it mean, tell me all your dirty jokes. For me, it's like, I care about your heart. You know that relationships are hard, no matter who you're in a relationship with. I know that parenting is really f***ng hard, no matter who your partner is and who your kids are.
Those are the things that it does not matter if you're gay or straight or trans or bi or whatever, wherever you fall on the spectrum, because we're all on a spectrum. Those things are the same. I can connect to somebody's heart about the things that have been hard for them, no matter what they're coming from, where they're coming from. That's culturally, sexually, all of it.
What you guys are doing is beautiful. We could go for hours with this, but we're running out of time. By the way, you've made some wonderful offers to our audience. We'll have all that stuff and links and everything in the show notes and on the website and everywhere so people will know how to reach you guys. The one that we're going to do is for all of our people watching and tuning in right now, and I'll let you guys, Kari and Scott, you can explain that.
You need to use a code so that they know you came from us to get the goodies because it's all about keeping things within the community. You want to give them a little bit of a hint. By the way, you do not have to be specific if you want to make a couple of changes along the way, so we can be flexible, but there are some bonuses and some benefits because you're here now.
We are offering a $300 discount per person with the promo code PRIDE25. The pricing, as I said before, includes your hotel accommodation. It includes all transportation during your trip. It’s going to be the majority of your meals. It includes a ticket to Disneyland to the Wonder Brothers tour. All the other special goodies we’re doing. We are also having a fabulous end-of-tour party, which is, we're hoping, we're working on some particularly special guests on that side of things.
We're partnering with the Los Angeles LGBT Center, so there will be some advocacy element of the tour as well and learning about how to reach this vulnerable community and how to support them. All of that is included in your pricing. It just depends on your occupancy what the per-person price is, but we're going to give everybody $300 off per person. If you're a family of four, that is going to be $1,200 savings on your total.
For our Pride Nomad, if you heard about us on Pride Nomad, just mention that when you book, and we're going to get you a free suite upgrade at the Santa Monica Hilton, which has a one-bedroom suite, which, as a parent, you know what that means. That means mom and dad can actually watch a show while the kids go to bed. It's amazing. We'll take care of that suite upgrade for you for that part of our tour, just for the Pride Nomads.
One thing I am going to say to the audience is, Kari and Scott have made this offer right now. If you're watching this in 2032, that offer may not still be around. I am going to say it's a limited-time offer. It's subject to time on that. The details will be on the website. I am just saying this to protect them because they're being very generous about that. I am always concerned that people promise too much and get themselves in trouble as a business. This will be available for a limited time only, boys and girls. It means book quick is the idea.
5/25 is time-sensitive, folks.
Again, when we record this stuff, it is evergreen because it will live on. We want to multi-purpose this and chop it up into parts and put it on YouTube channels and Instagram and all that stuff to help people on. I am saying that again just to protect everybody along the way. With that, any final parting shots?
We are conscious of the fact that people think of LA these days and think of the Los Angeles fires. First thing we've been reassuring our patron list and all the people we know is that, in fact, our families and truly closest friends are safe. Everybody knows somebody who's lost something really terrible. However, it is in an area uptown that we will indicate, but it's not as though the city is a scar on the earth. We've still got everything to offer in LA. We're wanting to rebuild. We make a very decent, if you care about what's been happening in Los Angeles, consider doing some good Samaritan tourism.
I agree with that. I purposely did not mention it only because I wanted an evergreen scenario here. Whoever you are, and this will take years realistically to rebuild, as it has for Manhattan.
It's like 9/11 for Manhattan. There's never going to be we're like, “Yes.” We also want to reassure that nothing that we already had on our itinerary in any of the affected areas. It's not our plan. Our itinerary does not have to change because of the fires. We're definitely conscious that people are concerned about air quality. We live here. We're watching all of that and want to make sure that people feel safe coming here. There's that added bonus of this is for sure a community that is trying to recover, trying to figure out how to move forward. Tourism is a big part of our economy. It can be a way to give back. If you're like, "I want to help out, what can I do?" This is a potential way, because we're going to be supporting a lot of local businesses.
LA is a fabulous place to be, regardless. With that said, Kari and Scott, I appreciate your being here. You guys are awesome. Thank you for joining us. Hope you'll have to come back again.
We would love to.
We're the Pride Nomad meets your family in Ireland bus tours.
We will have that baby for sure.
Parents and kids are gay travel. I love that.
We call it Fam and Adventures. We did not do it only because, frankly, it was so much work and I could not monetize it. Just given everything else I was doing, it would have been a labor of love. At the end of the day, I was like, "I want to be on the trip, not run it."
Even the mama's boys.
We did fan-friend adventures, as in fan family and friend adventures. We did that because, given the response we got, we had everybody wanting to come. It was like, "You guys are going to have so much fun. We just want to come." Nobody cares. It was like, "We just know it will be a hoot." The guys will go out whoring up, and the moms will be out drinking, whatever, and they'll just have a blast. That was the idea. It's like, “This is just too much fun." Who does it? Let me tell you what, even non-gay people know the gay bar is much more fun.
Let me tell you what. Even non-gay people know the gay bar is much more fun.
No question. Back on the cruises, when I did my first Atlantis cruise, the crew was like, "The gay crew is the best crew ever." At that time, with all due respect to my friends that are from overseas, because I have most of my time spent overseas, just remember that at that time Atlantis was encouraging the crew to not just be down below, but to come up and play. They just had the best time ever. We want that. Life is too damn short for otherwise.
With where we're building our community, in terms of building our LGBTQ plus mastermind and other things that we're doing, it's all about building that. We certainly want to help you do that. Have Pride Nomad Hub launching soon, which will be the place we want as a global resource for everything that's LGBTQ. All the tours, all the Pride events, all the chiropractors and the dentists and the go-go studios and the plumbers in one place aggregated so that it's the hub of everything that we have globally. There's nothing done to the scale. We want to build that. It's important.
May I add one small little part of our experience? Kari and I suppose this week in Pride very carefully because of the fine line that we're trying to. I am more of the Atlantis cruise line. Kari would be much more interested in the family-friendly type of experience for her vacation. We understand that when you have families with teenagers or pre-college students, or family experiences that you want to be properly family-friendly, that you want to navigate that Pride discourse intelligently.
It chose a week that was after San Francisco Pride and before Los Angeles Pride. That means that families can decide however much they want to fully experience and engage with the community. That they can go in a week when it's going to be more relaxed, and there's not going to be any pressure to do any organized Pride unless they want to do it on their own.
That's really smart.
We can definitely offer.
You guys got it dialed in. That's awesome. You guys go there now. Get it done. Go check on these guys. Bill said you can tell. Kari and Scott, you guys are awesome.
Thanks.
Thank you so much. Great to talk to you.
Important Links
About Kari Payne and Scott Bishop
Both born in the City of Angels, pursuing parallel paths in theatre and spirituality, Kari and Scott met as Dramatic Art majors at UC Santa Barbara. It was FIRE at first sight and the two kindred spirits have maintained their connection over the miles and years ever since. A second spark was lit when they decided to combine their nearly 30 years experience designing and guiding travel experiences — and this came to fruition as Better Angels Travel.
Inspired by the city of their birth and their shared aspiration of being guided by “better angels,” they are launching curated tours of their beloved Southern California. Soon, Better Angels will feature destinations throughout the globe in the hopes of offering “more of the world for more of us.” In the last eighteen years, Scott and Kari have also built families of their own— Scott with his husband Francesco and their community, and Kari and her husband Sam and their two amazing kids.
Kari envisioned travel with her family where she, her kids, and friends’ LGBTQ kids would feel safe and have real fun and come as they are. As for Scott, his first experience leading a Europe tour with a trans kid and their awesome supportive family was enough to ignite a vision for Better Angels Travel— inclusive travel that just like the LGBTQ and allied community itself, crackles and cackles with joy.
