Motivated by Mom: Q&A with accessibleGo Founder Miriam Eljas

We caught up with one of the most forward-thinking women in the travel industry and asked her our top 10 questions:

1. What is the service accessibleGO provides?
accessibleGO offers bookings, reviews, resources, and community. We take the travel experience and break it up into three parts: Plan, Reserve, and Share. When you are planning, you can look up content like which museums allow visitors who are blind to touch exhibits or local resources such as service providers like accessible transportation or equipment rental. You can book with confidence by relying on our accessibility reviews, accessibility data, and personalized customer service to confirm your accessibility requests. After your trip, you can pay it forward by contributing reviews, answering questions in our forum or writing a blog about your experience. 

How does it work? 
Our booking experience is currently focused on U.S. hotels and enables our users to filter and compare accessibility features and accessibility reviews.  When booking, you can fill out whatever accessibility requirements you have.  With this information in hand, our customer service team then contacts the hotel or travel service provider to make sure your accessibility needs will be met. If you encounter any issues before or even during your stay, our team is available to contact the property’s manager on your behalf. We will soon be expanding our current booking capabilities for car rentals and flights to showcase accessibility as well.

2. What need does accessibleGO address? 
The problems that people with disabilities face when traveling usually revolve around information—either they are getting inaccurate accessibility information or they’re not able to find any accessibility information in advance. Until now there was no [online]  platform where the community could share information about accessible travel experiences for everyone’s benefit. Our platform is built upon a foundation of accessibility data.

3. What is your origin story and what phase of the start-up life cycle are you currently in?
I started accessibleGO because of my mother, Emma Eljas, who had MS. Growing up in Silicon Valley with a parent who was a wheelchair user, we constantly encountered situations where knowing about the accessibility in advance would have made all the difference. I remember when I was a teenager I wanted to go to the movies with my mother. We called in advance and a well-meaning staff person informed us the theater was accessible with a ramp. When we arrived, we discovered there were stairs everywhere. Their concept of a ramp? A cracked piece of thin plywood. After that, I promised myself that I would eventually start a company that would prevent these miscommunications. After working in venture capital and selling my media company in NYC, I cofounded accessibleGO with our CTO Jeffrey Schlanger and VP Strategic Planning Galia Kut.

People are using accessibleGO.com to research and book travel plans, identify local services as well as connect with others.

—MIRIAM ELJAS

After several consumer beta tests to assess the market and test the product, we are ready to scale up operations. Our priority will be to make our platform more feature-rich and to expand globally.

4. From where do you obtain your hotel supply?
We are part of the Priceline Partner Network, so we have access to all the inventory from their system, including booking.com, agoda.com and others. We are gathering accessibility data for hotels across the U.S., with close to 5,000 hotels to date and up to 40 data points per hotel. When you look up hotels in our system, we display accessibility data whenever available. That may be a roll-in shower, step-free entrance, Braille signage, bed height or visual notification devices. 

Hotels have the ability to log in and publish their accessibility information. Our team is doing outreach to onboard hotels to upload their data. We are on schedule to cover a majority of hotels in the USA within the next 2 years.

5. How many hotels are in your system in North America?  Worldwide?In North America, there are over 50,000 hotels, worldwide about 200,000.

6. What is your business model? Our revenue comes primarily from booking commissions.  

7. How many consumers do you have in your system? 
60,000, mostly from a 5-month consumer beta test.

8. What makes you unique from competitors such as Expedia, Handiscover, Booking.com etc.?
The site has filters for over 40 accessibility data points, reviews that are exclusively about accessibility and a travel forum to check with community members about any aspect of your travel planning and get inspired. This is not available on mainstream travel sites. When you book with accessibleGO, our team personally calls the hotel, confirms your requirements will be met and even gets the name of the hotel staffer verifying the accessibility and sends you a confirmation email. This is a fundamental part of our business model.

9. How do you plan to build demand and usage?
A big part of our model is happy customers and viral growth. Check out our ‘thank you’ wall here.  

Through partnerships with non-profit organizations that serve people with disabilities, we are expanding our consumer base and building a real community. Paid online advertising has also proved effective through market testing and we plan to continue these efforts as we grow.

10. Can you provide insights on the destinations that your users are searching for? 
At first, we assumed that the most popular destinations in the U.S. would be of the most interest to our community (Orlando, New York or Las Vegas). So we based our hotel accessibility data, travel content and trip resources around the top 30 cities. However, when we ran a consumer beta test on bookings, we were surprised to discover the exact opposite. The bookings were not for popular vacation spots. For example, while 15% of bookings were in Florida, they were not in Florida’s biggest hot spots.

We found that 85% of our bookings are outside the top 30 cities in the U.S. including cities like Independence, MO, Pigeon Forge, and Gatlinburg TN and Fort Lauderdale, FL.  Many people were traveling for family visits, doctor appointments or small trips for personal reasons, not grand vacations in big cities.  We also noticed a pattern for medical visits, with bookings to Rochester, MN where the Mayo Clinic is located as well as near Houston’s Texas Medical Center.