Inclusion at most companies lives in a policy document; at
Virgin Atlantic it walks down the aisle in whichever uniform feels true. The airline was crowned Winner of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Award at the
2024 Travelling for Business Awards, honouring the organisation that best demonstrated dedication to DE&I within its own walls.
The airline's credentials are structural, not seasonal. Its
Be Yourself Manifesto commits the company to a culture where every colleague can bring their whole self to work, and the commitments have kept turning into firsts: the pioneering gender identity uniform policy, allowing crew and ground staff to wear the uniform that best reflects who they are regardless of gender; updated grooming guidance that ended dated prohibitions, including on visible tattoos, opening aviation careers to people the industry once screened out; optional pronoun badges normalising respect at thirty-five thousand feet; and, further back, the world's first Pride Flight, crewed entirely by LGBTQ+ colleagues. A partnership with the Attitude Awards stretching well over a decade evidences commitment that long predates inclusion's corporate fashion.
The instinct is foundational. Sir Richard Branson championed LGBTQ+ rights when doing so carried commercial risk rather than credit, and the airline he built has treated individuality as brand equity ever since, visible today in campaigns fronted by its own wonderfully varied workforce and in recruitment programmes widening access to flight decks and hangars alike.
Judges in 2024 weighed Virgin Atlantic against fellow finalist American Express GBT, a serious force for inclusion on travel's corporate side, and found in the airline the category's clearest proof that authenticity scales: policies employees feel, customers see, and competitors, eventually, copy.
The airline pairs internal culture with external advocacy. Its long-running Attitude Awards partnership, visible Pride participation and research into travellers' experiences abroad extend the inclusion agenda beyond its own payroll, while colleague networks help shape policies before they launch rather than critique them after. The result reads less like a programme than a temperament, which is exactly why competitors find it so difficult to imitate.
The
Travelling for Business Awards created this category to accelerate exactly that copying, and Virgin Atlantic's 2024 win handed the industry both a standard and a challenge, wrapped, naturally, in whichever uniform fits best.
