TravelAbility Insider

The Intersection of Travel and Disability

Hotels

Is Fear Keeping You From Tackling Accessibility Challenges?

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mom and dad hug their grown son who is smiling. son has Down's syndrome.Apart from the obvious moral arguments, people with disabilities comprise a huge and growing market, explains Catherine Roberts in a piece for Travel Mole. She writes that while people working in the travel industry love to share that passion for travel with other people—and hopefully inspire them to travel, too—the industry still has a way to go when it comes to accessibility needs. Roberts comments make sense: “One of the reasons is fear. But we don’t have to be perfect straight away. We just have to start a dialogue with travelers who live with disabilities – and be willing to say yes, we’ll try to help. We can ask openly about holiday requirements, as we would with any client.” Read more of her insightful comments, here.

Our take: Many people fear that their attempt to become accessible will fall short. Every disability has a spectrum and it’s almost impossible to be 100% accessible. The goal is trying and making it known that you are. 

 

 

Let A Travel Pro Design Accessible Itineraries For Your Destination

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meet the TravelAbility itinerary design teamIf you are looking for an accessible itinerary to post on your site or offer as a service to the burgeoning group of travelers who need some accessibility built into their stay, where do you start?

You could go with what comes up on Google (meh) or you could trust five of the most curious, experienced and trustworthy pros in disability tourism (yes!) Imagine: Signed, sealed, delivered, it’s yours to publicize on your website and share through your social media channels.

Niche travel is sold through itineraries that include attractions, tours, and sites that cater to a specific audience,” stated Jake Steinman, founder of TravelAbility Summit. “We brought them together to help destinations add authenticity to their accessible itineraries by having them created by actual travelers with different disabilities who are prominent professionals in the industry.

“Once these itineraries are designed, DMO’s can promote the fact that they were designed by disability travel thought-leaders, all of whom have their own extensive following and can offer cross-promotion opportunities as well as consultation advice.”

Here is some background information on each itinerary design team member.

head shot of Cory Lee smiling wearing t shirt. He has eyeglasses and is sitting in his wheelchairCory Lee Woodard writes a travel blog Curb Free with Cory Lee and recently started his own travel agency. On his blog, full of detailed itineraries from around the globe, his mission is to show readers how, where and why to travel as a person with a disability. If you’ve got questions—what city is the most wheelchair-friendly? to what’s the best way to determine if a hotel has a roll-in shower? Cory Lee has answers.

sid in a black hat and olive green sweater


Sid Marcos is a business developer from San Diego, California. She is the former director of development for Outlandish Travel, where she produced accessible destination guides around fun themes such as pub tours. She is a founding member of the National Startup League and director of an incubator for social entrepreneurs. Learn more on her blog.

sue Slater head shot she has red hair and is smiling wearing a jacket and black topSue Slater, the founder of Presto Magic Travel, is a cruise and groups specialist who will soon be celebrating her 20th year in the travel industry creating accessible itineraries. She’s sent thousands of people on cruises all over the world, including cruise destination weddings. Accessibility is a personal passion and a necessity. Sue is blind and her husband has a chronic disability that requires him to use a wheelchair. Both travel extensively, hence she can find a work-around for pretty much any travel need you might have. Learn more, here.

upper body shot of John wearing a navy jacket and blue shirt sitting inside a plane smiling, wearing glasses John Morris approaches travel from a critical angle—in a good way. His fact-checking and reporting on the latest news in accessible travel is unrivaled. That’s probably because he’s traveling the world an average of 310 days a year as a triple amputee with one hand, a passport and a power wheelchair, writing about his travels and adventures—and asking crucial accessibility questions along the way. Read his blog, wheelchairtravel.org.

All five experts will be on-site at TravelAbility Summit, November 12-13 in San Francisco. The team will be given designated “office hours” at the end of each day to talk with you about creating authentic accessible itineraries

 

Airlines, Hotels, Attractions Prove Disability Inclusion Isn’t Just the Right Thing to Do—It’s Great for Business

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an average of 28% higher revenue, 30% greater economic profit margins

According to a recent study of 140 U.S. companies by Accenture–alongside the American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD) and Disability:IN those businesses that offered the most inclusive working environment for disabled employees achieved an average of 28% higher revenue, 30% greater economic profit margins, and twice the net income of their industry peers between 2015 and 2018. Here are 2019’s top travel-industry scorers on the Disability Equality Index (DEI), a national comprehensive benchmarking tool.*

The following companies scored 80% or above on the DEI:

  • Airlines/Cruise Lines: American Airlines, Delta, Southwest, United Airlines, Royal Carribean
  • Hotels: Choice Hotels
  • Attractions: The Walt Disney Company, Comcast NBCUniversal
    To learn  more about how they became models of inclusion in the travel sector, READ MORE

OUR TAKE: The business benefits of creating an inclusive workforce are now abundantly clear. But what are the benefits for travelers? The upside is huge, actually. An inclusive internal workforce is a natural pathway to creating accessible products and authentic marketing. The more first-hand knowledge you have of the disability community and the particular needs of a certain group, the better you will be able to serve that consumer. Kudos to all who scored in the top ranks on the Disability Equality Index, the most comprehensive benchmarking tool for disability inclusion.

*Please Note: A score of 100 does not mean to convey “perfection.” AAPD and Disability:IN recognize there is no one “right” way to practice inclusion, and that some practices may be more practical for some companies or industries than others. A score of 100 on the DEI simply means that a company adheres to many of the numerous leading disability inclusion practices featured in the DEI.

 

EXPERT Q&A: The Secret to Creating a 5-Star Accessible Hotel Website on a 2-Star Budget

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Nate Lane stands in front of a skyline in afternoon sun with sunglasses on and a plaid blue collared shirt. He is smiling.

Our expert sources tell us that compliance lawsuits are not only on the rise, but they are also becoming increasingly complex. Could most of us in the travel industry create completely accessible websites on our own? Probably not. That’s why we asked expert Nate Lane, senior director of digital platforms at Travel Tripper (left)to share advice on the future of ADA compliance, building websites for hotels and being proactive about all things accessibility.

We asked:

Q: How did the idea of being more proactive about ADA compliance come about?
A: More and more of our clients started to receive ADA demand letters and lawsuits related to both technical and content related compliance. We were already helping our hotel clients by building their websites to be compliant from the start— and doing our best to maintain compliance over time. But because the websites were being edited by multiple parties it was impossible to know when an area of the site had fallen out of compliance because of a modification. We decided we needed more—a proactive compliance solution with real-time violation alerts that would fit into a hotel’s allowable budget.  Nothing we saw on the market fit all our criteria, so we built our own platform. Traveltripper accomplishes all of our goals. We used it internally for 18 months before making it broadly available to any hotel. TravelTripper is completely standalone and can monitor any website. It is completely CMS (Content Management System) and programming language agnostic. Furthermore, it runs outside of your website, meaning it doesn’t require an install and there are no implications to site speed or performance.

Q: Aside from using your system, how would you advise hotels that receive demand letters or lawsuits to respond?
A: First, be proactive about compliance instead of reactive. When lawsuits come in, despite your best efforts to achieve compliance quickly, a “who done it” timeline is put together and if you’re out of compliance, you’re much more likely to have to settle with the plaintiff. By being proactive and having records of compliance you are able to prove compliance, or a path to compliance, during a certain time period. Our platform automates this entire process for you, but if you’re not a client of ours we still recommend that you keep all of your records related to compliance on hand and ready to reference.

Second, It is absolutely essential that you demand information related to how an error occurred, including the exact assistive device that was used, and you re-create that error. More and more frequently, plaintiffs and their attorneys are becoming more and more creative and far-reaching with the contents of these lawsuits. From there you must review WCAG 2.1 AA-Level statutes to determine if the accusation is relevant for hotels in the first place. Recently we’ve helped our clients respond to lawsuits where an open-source screen reader was used, which had a public-facing “known bugs” log, which aligned perfectly with the violations the plaintiff reported. It was the tool, not the website! By investigating this and providing the information, the lawsuit was dropped. In another recent case, for the first time, we saw a plaintiff sue a hotel citing AAA-Level violations, which are typically required by the government, medical, or insurance providers—not hotels. Again, the lawsuit was dropped based on the hotel’s proactive approach and research.

Q: What’s in the future? 
A: We are beginning to roll out a third-party licensing and reseller strategy for those companies that want to partner with us. We plan to scale our platform within the hotel industry and then pursue multi-vertical opportunities.

Q: Do you have a pricing model for hotels?
A: Our pricing is aligned with hotel budgets, which typically corresponds with room count and ADR. We charge a one-time setup fee of $1,200 and an ongoing monthly fee of $200-$600 depending on the number of rooms. This covers the initial content audit and re-writes, ongoing real-time monitoring, quarterly extensive audits including manual usage of assistive devices, and the ability to export your complete compliance history that is stored within our system, which saves you and your legal team hours of time if you need to respond to a lawsuit.

 

People With Disabilities Want to Make Over the Travel Industry

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beard welcoming a woman to a boutique hotel she is smiling.The travel industry need not be afraid of the seemingly high cost or complicated business of accessibility, according to a recent piece in Forbes. Progress with accessibility can be achieved one tiny step at a time by asking visitors with a disability what can be done to make their experience more enjoyable.  Sometimes it’s a simple, but obvious service request that costs nothing like having check-in staff come out from behind the counter to onboard someone in a wheelchair, or it might be an inexpensive product or app that can fill the gap between legal compliance and pleasurable experiences.. 

OUR TAKE: Just like everyone else, the disability community wants to be heard. Listening to their needs conveys respect and eventually can result in incremental changes. In aggregate, these small changes will, over time, position hotels and attractions as ready to welcome the estimated 30% of the population who will have a disability in their lifetime. It’s not just the right thing to do, it’s the right business move to make now. 

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