Women in Travel summit held in Chattanooga

CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. (WDEF)-  “These are very well traveled people. They’ve been to a lot of different places and it takes a lot to surprise them.”

Hundreds of travel content creators and influencers are in town this weekend for their annual gathering, the Women in Travel Summit hosted by Wanderful at the Chattanoogan Hotel.

Beth Santos started Wanderful, a travel community catered to women, as a blog while she was living abroad in 2009.

Five years later, she began hosting an annual meeting called the Women in Travel Summit, that has been held all over the world.

Nearly 500 travel content creators and influencers, mostly women, meet to network and explore the area they’re visiting, which for the first time for the summit is Chattanooga.

Santos explained, “The creator economy is evolving so much and I think from a tourism perspective and from a digital media perspective there’s a lot of unknowns. You know a lot of people are trying to figure out, ‘How can I do this? I really love to travel. I wanna be location independent. I wanna be able to have my own business. How do I actually make that work?”

She says that she believes the impact of this summit goes beyond what the attendees learn inside of their sessions, but what they will then go tell their audiences about Chattanooga.

Santos said, “A lot of people who are like. ‘Oh I’ve been to Nashville, I’ve been to Memphis, but wow Chattanooga’s really, really cool and I’m amazed by it.’ So that element of surprise then create something that they can talk about and write about so now they’re sharing with their audience, ‘Oh my gosh, you know you thought you knew Tennessee but have you been to Chattanooga? That’s a really cool place. You should go check it out!’ And it just expands beyond that.”

She says that our area’s natural beauty, attractions, and food scene have all been hits.

Santos said, “I tell people this isn’t just 500 attendees. This is 500 tradeshows like if you think about a tradeshow as a place that has 10-20,000 consumers showing up through the doors, each person who comes here is representing their 50-100,000 audience members if not more.

In addition to the summit’s workshops inside the Chattanoogan, attendees will also be taking excursions into our community.