TravelAbility Insider

The Intersection of Travel and Disability

John Morris

5 Deciding Factors When Booking an Accessible Hotel

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Woman seated in her wheelchair in front of a mural of wings painted on a brick wall.

The top disability lifestyle and travel blogger in the United Kingdom, Emma Muldoon, recently assembled a list of key factors to consider when booking an accessible hotel room as a wheelchair user.

In commenting on accessible travel demand, she notes that “Disability will affect all of us at some point in our lives and currently, 1 in 5 people are disabled.” This presents an opportunity for the travel industry, as “the collective spending power of disabled people is called The Purple Pound and is estimated at £274 billion a year.” In order to take advantage of that opportunity, business including hotels must ensure adequate wheelchair accessibility for disabled guests.

With this in mind, Emma assembled her list of things disabled people search for when choosing where to stay on holiday. To read the full list, check out the article on the Simply Emma website.

TravelAbility Launches “Destination Ally” to Help DMO’s Create More Accessible Experiences

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TravelAbility destination ally logo.

The purpose of TravelAbility’s recently announced Destination Ally program is to provide DMO’s with the resources to become accessible for visitors with disabilities and their families. These resources include training videos, slide decks and The Accessibility Playbook, a proprietary 40-page blueprint to grow accessibility for the destination.  “While the ADA provides a baseline for physical infrastructure accessibility, there’s no ADA for information,” stated Jake Steinman, founder of TravelAbility.

Participating Destinations include:

  • Visit Mesa
  • Visit Fairfax
  • Experience Kissimmee
  • Discover Lancaster
  • Visit Tampa Bay
  • Visit Lauderdale
  • Travel Lane County
  • Travel Oregon
  • Arizona Tourism
  • Visit the Oregon Coast

For more information about the Destination Ally program contact tricia@travelability.net.

A Meetings and Events Accessibility Checklist for Planners

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Large number of people seated at an event.

Cornell’s Human Resources department recently developed an accessibility checklist to ensure that meetings and events are accessible to everyone.

The university wrote, “It is our expectation that all meetings and events sponsored by Cornell are accessible to individuals with disabilities. Taking care to create an accessible event benefits not only individuals with visible or known disabilities, but also helps to ensure that all participants/attendees, including individuals with non-obvious disabilities and/or chronic health conditions, and people of all ages and body types, are able to fully engage in the program.”

The checklist is a fantastic resource for meeting planners who are just beginning their journey to be accessible and inclusive, and we recommend that you download this resource from the Cornell website.

Celebrity Cruises Using World-Renowned Photographers to Showcase Inclusive Travel

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A group of world-renowned photographers, including the iconic American portrait artist Annie Leibovitz, have joined Celebrity Cruises in a ground-breaking new project to change the people portrayed in travel marketing.

In the world of travel, “all-inclusive” generally means that everything on your vacation is included. But what about the deeper meaning of the term? When you look at images of travel, do they actually portray inclusivity? Do you see adequate representation of people with disabilities, or people from different ethnicities or LGBTQ+ groups?

The answer, often, is no. But through its “All-Inclusive Photo Project” (AIPP), Celebrity Cruises is seeking to make the people featured in its marketing materials more reflective of the global population.

Among the disabled people featured in this new marketing campaign are fashion model Jillian Mercado, who has muscular dystrophy and uses a wheelchair, and Amy Conroy, a Paralympic wheelchair basketball player for Team Great Britain in the 2012 and 2016 Paralympic Games.

To learn more about the AIPP, check out the Celebrity Cruises blog.

Meet ‘Obama the Pony’ Who is Helping Make Glasgow Parks More Accessible

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Man using a wheelchair that is secured to a carriage pulled by a pony.

The English and Scottish countrysides are breathtaking – gorgeous rolling meadows meet grassy hilltops and lead to beautiful beaches. Simon Mulholland, through his Pony Access organization, is working to make Scotland’s public parks and beaches wheelchair accessible through an innovative wheelchair accessible pony-drawn carriage.

He has had a vision of bringing ponies back into mainstream communities since he started building pony-powered vehicles 20 years ago. First trialed in England, he found difficulty in gaining buy-in from the public and local governments. Now, after moving to Scotland, he’s making headway in a community that embraces his vision for pony-driven accessibility.

His vision, he said, “is about access.” He commented, “Oddly enough, this isn’t really a pony activity, it is an accessible activity.”

Mulholland’s pony-drawn carriages open up new vistas to disabled people. In an interview with the Glasgow Times, he remarked, “If somebody wanted to go bird watching or anything, I don’t care, they want to go and do something and they can’t get there. I can get them there and that’s what it is about.”

He emphasized that his pony drawn vehicle is not a “disabled activity” yet an “inclusive activity.” Essentially, it’s an experience that’s open to everyone, with accessibility being a key consideration from the start.

To read more about Pony Access, see the article in the Glasgow Times.