Intercultural Experience Training

You can travel in a way that engages and benefits your host community. This way of traveling is powerful and it pulls you out of your comfort zone. You meet people from the community. You experience what the locals experience. You might feel confused and unsure of yourself. You have high contrast experiences. This is the kind of travel that grows your cultural intelligence (aka CQ), and Beyond Tourism can prepare you, instead of showing up in a country, doubtful of your ability to interact. You can learn to leave behind harmful cultural programming, gain a new perspective on the world, be a competent traveler, and make genuine connections across cultures. Beyond Tourism can help you plan your preferred type of travel, or prepare you for travel you have already booked.

Cultural intelligence will help you stay open to receive the lessons your international travel is trying to teach you. It will provide you with a deeper, more transformative experience and will change how you understand the world.

“International travel is consistently listed as being among the top three to five transformative experiences in the lives of adults. Experiencing the jarring nature of being removed from our familiar surrounding, when combined with these other practices, is one of the most powerful ways to look below the tip of the iceberg. Those of us with opportunities to travel abroad are entrusted with an amazing resource for deepening our interpretive CQ.”

— David Livermore in
Cultural Intelligence: Improving Your CQ to Engage With Our Multicultural World

Learn more about Renae

Hi! I’m Renae and I own and operate Beyond Tourism. I love talking about, thinking about, and teaching about cultural intelligence. It’s one of the most exciting things I’ve discovered in life, and has allowed me to get to know and hear the stories some of the most remarkable people on the planet.

I lived abroad in South Korea for a year in my 20s teaching English to kids. That’s when I first started to understand the significance culture has on a person. It was a challenging and growth-filled year for me, not to mention when I came back and struggled to find the words to describe what I experienced.

I have spent many years of my career working and volunteering with refugees and immigrants, so while I have lived abroad, I also know a lot about building cultural intelligence from home. You can read more of my story here, including about my passion for music from around the world and radio show I have every week. I am certified by the Cultural Intelligence Center and you can see my credentials below. I can’t wait to help you grow your cultural intelligence!