DENVER, CO – A young blind man prepares to board a Denver RTD light rail train at Union Station… [+] Train station in Denver, Colorado. (Photo by Robert Alexander/Getty Images)
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Everyone is talking about travel, with frequent rail strikes in the UK, many delays and flight cancellations due to staffing shortages, and travel disruptions due to issues at borders. This can be very frustrating and has a debilitating effect on all travellers.
Regardless of the post-COVID recovery, the associated barriers to travel, and the current political climate, travelling is always going to be a challenging and humiliating experience for people with disabilities. Think about the 1.3 billion people with some kind of disability (80% of whom are invisible), who constantly struggle to travel and whose dignity and independence are often under threat. The 2020 National Travel Survey found that adults with disabilities travel 28% less on average than adults without disabilities.
In fact, the travel industry’s failure to embrace inclusive design means that people with disabilities are excluded and do not receive the same customer experience and treatment as everyone else. Too often, they end up waiting excruciatingly long periods of time for assistance, getting stranded on planes or being left behind at airports.
DENVER, Colorado – A customer care representative helps a passenger with a disability get to the boarding gate at the airport. [+] Denver International Airport in Denver, Colorado. (Photo by Robert Alexander/Getty Images)
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The inability of wheelchair users to access airplane toilets and business/first class, the lack of accessible hotel rooms, the severe lack of website accessibility, and the recent uncertainty surrounding the blue disability badge in the EU (post-Brexit, 11 countries including France, Spain and Portugal remain “undecided” on whether to accept the UK’s blue badge permit) reinforce negative perceptions of the disability community as an inconvenience and an afterthought.
We want a world that is accessible and inclusive, yet it has been built to be exclusive. It needs to be rebuilt, not retrofitted or added on, and to achieve this, people with disabilities need to be included in the design process. “Nothing for us, without us.”
Recently, people have been sharing videos of “airport hacking” on social media, where people pretend to need a wheelchair while travelling through the airport in order to skip queues and speed up boarding. Heathrow CEO John Holland Kaye has spoken out about the harm this practice causes to people who require wheelchair assistance and called for an immediate end to it. In this travel disruption, where ableism is a common factor in the hardships that disabled people face every day, do people think the disabled community has an advantage?
The Bespoke Hotel’s Liberty Room showcases a discreet ceiling track with a working hoist.
Custom-made Hotel
But many brands are realizing this and making strides towards providing inclusive and accessible travel services. We spoke to Robin Sheppard, chairman of Bespoke Hotels, who has long championed accessibility by prioritizing aesthetics. At Manchester’s Hotel Brooklyn, special features can be hidden or removed, so the space is pleasing to the eye, whatever the need. This is surprisingly rare. The spacious marble showers are step-free, doorways are wide enough for a wheelchair, and some suites even have hoists for people to climb into. “We call these Liberty Rooms,” Sheppard said. “For some people, these spaces may not feel very different. We hope they feel like they’ve been upgraded.”
Heather Hepburn, Head of Accessibility at Skyscanner, commented: “The travel industry has a huge opportunity to improve when it comes to accessibility. Through the Skyscanner Accessibility Programme, we are determined to continually improve accessibility and inclusive design across all Skyscanner products and ensure digital accessibility is embedded into Skyscanner’s tools, processes and ways of working. Our mission is to raise awareness and support of accessibility across the business and make travel better for everyone.”
Skyscanner is committed to improving accessibility across its products and has created a series of accessible travel tips and accessible travel content programmes (see one example here). Skyscanner has worked to ensure that its interactive maps, created to help travellers navigate different travel restrictions, are as accessible as possible and work well with screen readers. Since launch, Skyscanner’s live travel maps have been used more than 37 million times around the world to help travellers navigate complex Covid-19 restrictions.
With a global platform of more than 20 brands, Expedia Group aims to make travel more accessible by enhancing its own capabilities, and is taking the necessary investments and steps to create an equitable experience for travelers.
“We believe travel is a force for good that can strengthen connections, broaden perspectives and bridge divides,” said Peter Kahn, vice chairman and chief executive officer, Expedia Group. “We support this belief by making travel more enjoyable and accessible for everyone, including people with disabilities. Through constant innovation, we aim to put the needs of travelers at the heart of everything we do and remove as many barriers as possible.”
Inclusion is essential to the success of the travel industry, ensuring that individuals can experience different cultures, perspectives and opportunities, regardless of race, ethnicity, ability or gender identity. Travel strengthens connections and broadens horizons, yet historical, physical and societal barriers often limit equitable access to travel. To make travel more accessible, it is essential to create products that can be used by people with the widest range of disabilities possible. In 2020, Expedia Group signed the CEO Action for Diversity & Inclusion™ pledge, committing to mobilize the travel industry to take important, actionable steps to advance diversity and inclusion.
The company recognizes that there is room for improvement in creating an accessible and inclusive travel experience for travelers with disabilities, and that this work will be an ongoing effort. The company recently took action to fund an initiative to understand the specific needs and pain points of travelers with accessibility needs and set goals to create an improved and equitable travel experience. Expedia Group recently took the following steps to improve the experience for travelers with disabilities:
We assembled a team to gain a deeper understanding of the systemic issues that lead to negative experiences for travelers with accessibility needs across the travel industry and in Expedia’s own experience. We conducted generative research on travelers with accessibility needs and caregivers to identify their needs and wants across a wide range of disability archetypes. We identified ways to measure the quality of experience for travelers with accessibility needs and set measurable goals to improve the experience for travelers. We conducted partner surveys to understand knowledge gaps about accessible travel, understanding that many bad experiences are caused by poor or missing accessibility content and identifying opportunities to increase awareness and empathy. We published the Accommodation Partner Guide as a resource to provide our partners with more quality information to help travelers decide if an accommodation or room is right for them. We conducted outreach efforts to help our travel partners get more complete accessibility attributes, which resulted in an increase in partners adding accessibility attribute information to their accommodations. We plan to make further efforts in the future.
For example, Expedia Group found that travelers who didn’t need accessible rooms were unintentionally booking them, making them unavailable for travelers who did. So they changed the sort order so that accessible rooms would appear below the cheapest room if they were listed for the same price. This change resulted in a nearly 24% reduction in unintentional accessible room bookings compared to the previous 12-month average (down from 7.5% to 5.7%).
Vrbo recently launched a new reporting feature that allows travelers to report accommodation listings that contain inaccurate, offensive, questionable, or fraudulent content. Travelers submitted 2,720 reports between December 2021 and January 2022 alone. This feature will reduce inaccuracies and barriers for travelers with disabilities. Expedia Group is focused on making the travel experience accessible and also puts great effort into ensuring that its digital properties and applications are accessible by allowing sites and apps to adapt to the specific tools and assistive technologies that users rely on. Whether a user navigates the screen using a screen reader or has a mobility impairment that prevents them from using a mouse or touch screen, Expedia Group takes great care to ensure that users have an accessible digital experience.
Adding restrictions and barriers will prevent customer buy-in. A quick breakdown of the purple pound shows it’s worth around £265 billion a year to the UK economy. Only 10% of UK businesses have a strategy targeting this market. Accessible tourism is worth $15.3 billion, so it’s in businesses’ best interest to tap into this customer group. As highlighted in The Power of the Purple Dollar, web accessibility is a source of stress for many when booking travel.
For the travel industry, the events of the past few months have been shocking and bring home the idea that for society to be inclusive it needs to be designed for all of us. We need to think more. No one should be deprived of the ability and opportunity to move and travel, whether it is an essential part of their job, access to health or education, or, if they are lucky, the wonderful experience of an adventure or family trip to another part of the world. The key is that inclusive travel and tourism is a decision or a commitment to design inclusion from the beginning of the journey.