Questions
If the answer is not here, ask us and we will add it.
Using the directory
What is Lavender Atlas?
A global LGBTQ+ travel directory. Bars, clubs, saunas, hotels, cafes, restaurants, beaches, shops, community services and trans and nonbinary resources, organised by city, with the events happening in each. Free to use, no account needed.
Do I need an account?
No. Everything is open. An account only buys you saved lists, so you can keep places you want to hit on a trip and share the list with whoever you are travelling with.
How do places get on here?
Some are researched and added by us, some are submitted by the people who run them, and some come from readers. Everything is reviewed before it goes live.
Why are there no reviews or star ratings?
Deliberate. Ratings on queer venues tend to punish the smaller, weirder, more specific places, and a four-star average tells you nothing about whether a bar is right for you. We would rather describe a place accurately and let you decide.
Is a listing here an endorsement?
No. It means the place exists, serves or welcomes LGBTQ+ people, and was accurate when we checked. Laws, owners and door policies change. Verify anything that matters to your safety before you travel.
Some of these countries criminalise being gay. Why list them?
Because people travel there anyway, for work, for family, and because they live there. Pretending a place has no queer life does not protect anyone. Where the legal situation is serious we say so on the city page.
How current is this?
Venues close, and we do not always hear first. If you find something wrong, the Report a Listing link on any listing page is the fastest way to tell us, and we do act on those.
What do the Featured badges mean?
That the business paid for placement. We label it every time. Paying changes where a listing sits on the page, never what we say about it, and never whether it is included at all.
Do you make money from the links?
Some hotel and tour links earn a commission at no cost to you. Any page carrying one says so, near the link.
The city I want is not on the map. How do I get it added?
Use the contact form and pick "Request a city". Check the nearest big city first, though. We fold smaller towns into whichever major city is within about 100 miles and keep the town name in the address, so a place in Oakland sits under San Francisco rather than having its own page. If a town is genuinely too far from anywhere to fold in honestly, it gets its own page.
How often is the newsletter?
No fixed schedule. It goes out when there is enough worth sending: new cities, listings and queer travel notes.
Getting listed
How do I add a listing or event?
Use Add a Listing, or Submit an Event for something with a date. Give us as much detail as you can, especially the address and a website or Instagram, because that is what we check against. Then it comes to us. Every submission is reviewed by hand, so give it a few days. You will get an email when yours goes live, with a link to it. You do not need to resubmit, and you do not need an account to send one in.
Something about a venue is wrong. How do I fix it?
Depends who you are. If you run the place, claim it, and then you can edit the hours, address, links and description yourself. If you do not run it, use the Report a Listing link on the page: you can suggest a correction, request removal, or flag something unsafe. Reports come straight to us, so it is the fastest way to fix a closed venue or a wrong address.
How do I claim my listing?
Find it, either by hitting Claim this listing on the listing itself or by searching for it on the Claim page. Give us the email address you want to manage it from, then click the link we send you. That link is the proof: whoever controls the inbox controls the listing, so nothing happens until you click it. If your email is on the same domain as the venue website, that usually verifies you on the spot; otherwise a person checks it and you can send something showing you run the place. Either way it is free.
What does it cost?
Adding a listing is free, and claiming it is free. Paid placement is optional: listings are $20, $49 or $125 a month, and annual billing gives you two months free. Featuring an event is $20, or $40 with a flyer. A one-off event is a single payment that runs until the date passes; recurring parties bill monthly.
I lost my edit link.
Manage your listing, put in the email you claimed with, and we send a fresh one.
Someone else claimed my business.
Contact us. We can check the claim and move it.
Will you list my business if it is not LGBTQ+ specific?
If it genuinely serves the community, yes. Being a welcoming bar that runs a Pride night once a year is usually not enough on its own. We are looking for places queer travellers would actually seek out.
Can I pay to be listed, or to rank higher in search?
You can pay for labelled placement within a city. You cannot pay to be added, to change what a listing says, or to influence search rankings.
How do I cancel?
From your billing page, any time. Placement runs to the end of the period you paid for. Refunds follow the refund policy.
Still stuck? Contact us. If you run a venue, claim your listing to edit it yourself.