Know Accessible Tourism

The leisure activities that enrich our lives are primarily non-accessible for disabled persons. Those activities may be sports, travel, shopping and nights out. Similar cases are there for senior citizens and people with temporary disabilities. Thus to enrich them with these missing activities of their life, accessible tourism has been introduced. Accessible tourism makes it easy for people with disability, senior citizens and people with temporary disabilities. It helps to enjoy tourism experiences to the fullest. These people may face special needs while travelling from one place to another. Accessible Tourism helps enrich the lives of all those people who are disabled.

Though it’s a new concept, the demand for accessible tourism grows with each passing year. According to the United Nations, around 10 per cent of the world’s population is disabled. Globally there is an ever-growing increase in the 65+ age group who benefit from accessible tourism. Targeted travellers of accessible tourism don’t travel alone; their caretakers accompany them. Therefore making tourism accessible to the disabled and the older people is an opportunity. It helps to have more than one traveller at a time rather than an obligation to develop infrastructures—moreover, accessible tourism benefits the whole tourism industry. Accessible tourism means a better economy and more significant job opportunities. We can also empower people with disabilities while ensuring accessible tourism.

Problems

The major problem faced by a disabled traveller is the lack of information. That information includes accessible accommodation, accessibility in the airport and wheelchair accessible local vehicles. They may lack reliable information about a specific site’s accessibility, accessible toilets, accessible restaurants and availability of wheelchairs, shower chairs and toilet raisers.

According to a report by UN-ESCAP on Barrier-Free Tourism, the significant issues identified for making tourism accessible include: travel planning information, accessible transportation, accessible accommodation and the destination experience.

Planning accessible tourism is a must to work effectively. They should have access to information about the accessibility of various venues and sites in the city they visit. The knowledge of the local transport systems and their accessibility, and information about barrier-free features of the hotel. Access to the experiences of other disabled/elderly travellers is beneficial for them to be able to make travel decisions.

While we are talking about accessible tourism, the tour operators must be thinking about its scope. They are businessmen and are running their business for money-making. Hence, we need to take reference from the outside world.

How many people with disabilities travel?

A study based on secondary data of the 35 million Americans with disabilities by Durgin, Lindsay, and Hamilton in 1985 estimated that 13 per cent of all travellers in the US had some form of disability. Woodside and Etzel did another study in 1980. They undertook the first empirical study on disability and tourism to discover the role of physical and mental conditions on tourism vacation behaviour. The survey found 10% of 590 respondents on household survey in US State of South Carolina who had gone on a trip and had their party with a ‘physical or mental member of condition’.

They concluded that while the demographic characteristics of those travelling did not vary significantly from other households, those with a disability had a lower level of travel than the general population. In 2004 the European Union countries’ OSSATE research estimated that tourists with disabilities contribute € 80 billion to the economy using gross demand estimates (Buhalis, Michopoulou, Eichhorn, & Miller, are 2005).

Research Done

In 2009, according to ENAT, “overnight trips made by or accompanied by someone with a health condition or impairment contributed almost l billion pound to the English domestic visitor economy in the first 6 months of the year accounting for 5.7 million trips in total. These latest figures highlight the importance of considering people with access needs, who in the year to June 2009 have accounted for 12 percent of all overnight domestic trips.”

Accessible tourism is still all to rise from the ground level of Nepal. People know the idea but are still unable to carry it out. A group of people with disability, disability activists, researchers, and tour operators plan to do a daylong preliminary workshop to raise awareness about accessible tourism among the tour operators and the concerned stakeholders. If the government is supportive, they might be having one extensive program about accessibility on World Tourism Day, September 27, this year. Furthermore, The theme for this year’s World Tourism Day celebration is “Tourism for All – Promoting Universal Accessibility”.

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Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash