People With Disabilities an Untapped Market for Tourism Industry
Accessible travel, barrier-free tourism, inclusive travel, tourism for all. Whatever you call it, the fact remains: travellers with disabilities and older persons with money and time to spend are expecting a wide range of travel options today. DR SCOTT RAINS discusses its impact on tourism trends.
TOURISM for people with disabilities is big business and the travel, hospitality and tourism industries, governments and even Disabled People’s Organisations (DPOs) are cashing in on this global trend.
You can even break it down into specialties – travel for slow walkers, dialysis cruises, senior citizen travel, medical tourism -- niche marketing is profitable.
Where did this “sudden” interest come from? It turns out that it’s not so sudden after all.
Just last year, two international accessible tourism conferences were held to full participation. The three-day Second International Conference on Accessible Tourism (ICAT 2007) was launched in Bangkok on November 24 just as a similar conference, the European Network on Accessible Tourism (ENAT), was ending in Spain.
ENAT, held from November 19 to 22, addressed the issue of accessibility and inclusion of travellers with disabilities. More than 200 representatives from international disability organisations, tourist boards and private enterprises came together for the event. They agreed unanimously that accessible tourism is the fastest-growing business opportunity in the tourism industry.
A growing market
United Nation estimates there are 650 million people with disabilities worldwide; with a significant portion of them, travellers with special needs.
The European Disability Forum estimates that there are some 50 million people with disability in Europe. Take into account the fast-growing population of people aged over 65 and the fact that those with disabilities rarely travel alone, and the market for accessible travel nearly trebles.
A recent study by the University of Surrey in England estimated that 127 million people, or 27 per cent of the European Union population, would benefit from accessible tourism, and that this niche industry has an estimated value of 80 billion euros (RM383 billion) per year. That figure doesn’t include pregnant women, families with young children and, vitally, travellers from the United States, Australia and the rest of the world.
So creating accessible cruise ships, accessible ship terminals, accessible ground transportation, and accessible tourist destinations is not charity. It is good business
Shortly after, Eric Lipp, founder of the Open Door Organisation in Chicago, United States began the first of his biennial surveys of the consumer power and travel behaviour of people with disabilities. Perhaps because the figures were so astounding it took a few years for their impact to be felt on the industry. Now it is well known that adults with disabilities in the US spend an average of US$13.6 billion (RM45 billion) annually on travel.
Lipp’s study found that the 42 million disabled travellers in the US take 31.7 million trips a year, and spend RM45 billion annually. Major areas of spending include RM11 billion on airfare, RM14 billion on hotel accommodation, and RM8.8 billion on food and beverage. In addition, adults with disabilities patronise restaurants about once a week, and they account for RM114 billion in annual revenue for restaurants.
The Disability Travel on the Rise Despite Barrier to Access research found that the number of American travellers with disabilities has increased by 50 per cent since 2005. The number of European travellers with disabilities has also increased, from 134 to 267.9 million.
Money, as they say, talks – and people have begun to listen.
ICAT 2007 had delegates from the United Nations and Thai government, faculty members and students of numerous universities as well as representatives of the travel industry as participants.
They were there to listen while experts with disabilities presented a strong case for promoting accessible tourism in the region.
Speaker Aiko Akiyama, Social Affairs Officer at ESCAP, the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific said:
“In ESCAP region, there are at least 400 million people with disabilities and a growing number of older persons. It is reported that 400,000 people used wheelchair rental services at the Hong Kong International Airport in 2006”.
This conference, at the United Nations Conference Centre, is organised by the ESCAP in cooperation with the Ministry of Tourism and Sports and the Ministry of Social Development and Human Security of Thailand, Bangkok Metropolitan Administration and Disabled People International Asia-Pacific.
For me, the conference was the completion of two years of planning that began through contact with Eden International. They, together with the Asia Pacific Disability Forum, had been pursuing the topic of disability and tourism from the perspective of development. This is similar to what we are doing at the Inter-American Institute on Disability and Inclusive Development but the Asian context brought in a new set of partners, issues, and competencies.
This was timely as a recent UN survey found that by year 2050, the numbers of ageing population will rise to 2,000 million and 54 per cent of them live in Asia and the Pacific region.
Thailand has realised the economic potential of accessible tourism and the conference was a powerful catalyst fuelled by the sheer geographic size and cultural diversity of Asia.
The immediate results in Thailand are also encouraging to me.
After the conference, accessibility expert Duangdao Thaikum and I assessed Pattaya, which is fast becoming a destination of choice for travellers with disabilities.
We enlisted the Pattaya Expat Club and RollOn Travel, an organisation specialising in accessible tours worldwide, to help us with the accessibility audit. Jan (Budsakayt) Intarapasan, a teacher in design at King Mongkutt’s University in Bangkok, and I did an accessibility audit of Ayutthaya, the Thai heritage city north of the capital. Jan and I will speak together on accessible tourism at Southeast Asian heritage tourism sites during the upcoming i-CREATe 2008 conference in Bangkok.
(i-CREATe 2008 is the 2nd International Convention on Rehabilitation Engineering & Assistive Technology, to be held from May 13 to 15, Bangkok.)
Two years ago, a group of disability travel advocates got together and began to plan for today. Then it was easy to report on trends in accessible tourism. The pattern was clear. The trend in 2005 was experimentation and local standardisation in controlled regional environments.
New “islands of innovation” were evident around the world. In fact, in most cases, they were either actual islands like Crete, Hawaii, Tenerife, Japan, St John’s Virgin Islands, and Tasmania, or they were geographically isolated regions like Western Australia.
The trend in 2007 is less about new invention and more about standardisation across larger areas and on an international level. It is a new stage of maturity but it will be over in about two years when we meet next in Singapore – this time with our European friends. Singapore is hosting the International Conference on Accessible Tourism 2009 (ICAT 2009).
Right now, we will continue to establish common practices and standards.
Sometimes it will feel like a tug-of-war; pulling in two opposite directions: one direction pulls toward a rights-based approach to standards and the other a profit-based approach. The first starts with persons with disabilities as citizens; the second, as customers. The first approach speaks in the language of governments; the second, the language of business. Effective standards result when people with disabilities are active in defining both approaches.
In fact, that is what ICAT is about. It is a voice of people with disabilities in conversation with government and business to serve the interests of all three groups regarding travel and hospitality.
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