The Future of Travel is Inclusive and Accessible

Have you heard of the “curb cut effect”? It’s a term used to illustrate how making things accessible for a group generally benefits more than only that group. For instance, having a sidewalk corner that slopes to the street (the cut curb) makes it easier for a wheelchair user to navigate, but it’s also a boon for parents pushing strollers, delivery people with dollies or even someone who overdid it at the gym yesterday and finds it painful to lift their feet over the curb today. 

It was an idea explored and discussed at the 2025 IMM Travmedia Summit, an event that brings together travel media, hotel and tour operators and destination marketing organizations (DMOs) for a day of learning. The Accessible Tourism panel was made up of disability advocates in the industry, and much of what was discussed boils down to a simple fact: making travel more widely accessible makes travel a little better for all of us. 

Someone who has a bad back or a trick knee and can’t walk long distances or finds maneuvering stairs challenging may not feel “disabled” but tours that feature elements that take  mobility issues into consideration will certainly be a benefit. 

Dollars and Sense

Kristy Durso, owner of Incredible Memories Travel, is a TravelAbility ambassador and the founder of the Accessible Travel Network. She spoke of the market impact of disability travel, noting that disabled travellers like herself spend 30% more on trips and travel in larger groups than on average. Aside from the fact that creating inclusive travel offerings is the right thing to do, she challenged the audience: “We spent $58.7 billion on accessible travel between 2018 and 2019. Where's your piece of that pie? Are you marketing to us? Are you specifically reaching out to us to get that 30%?”

Stephanie Rodriguez is a disability advocate with a colourful biography. She is the Changemaker for TheGlobalFund.org, a member of the U.S. Department of State’s OSAC.gov Women in Security Council, a serial entrepreneur, a parafencer for Australia, and a double amputee. She spoke about the importance of learning how to ask questions about travellers' needs in an elegant and respectful way. “Asking, ‘What can we do to make your stay more comfortable and safer for you?’ would be a great educational question to begin with,” said Rodriguez. 

Accessible Travel Resources

The good news is that there are some high quality resources available, and those of us in the industry have the opportunity to do more.

Jake Steinman, founder and CEO of TravelAbility moderated the panel. He likened disabled travellers to detectives, needing forensic skills to uncover if a tour or destination will be able to accommodate their needs.

Travel advisors can do a lot to help discover this information to ease their clients’ worries. Your clients may already be familiar with the accessibility toggle on Google Maps, but if not you can help them by showing them how to activate it following the steps in that link.  It was the brainchild of panelist Sasha Blair-Goldensohn, Maps Accessibility and Disability Inclusion Lead at Google.

By having the setting enabled, users are able to see if more than 55 million locations worldwide are wheelchair accessible, have handicapped parking, accessible bathrooms and any other information the local guide or business has chosen to provide. “I normally want to put something in [to the Maps app] to make it easy to find good wine, good dumplings,” said Blair-Goldensohn “But if you can't get in the door and find that the place has an accessible entrance and accessible restroom, the rest doesn't really matter.”

Steinman shared another statistic based on a study he worked on, which found that of 165 destination websites, only 35 had a page dedicated to accessible travel, and it took an average of 4.5 minutes to find them buried on the website. Some of the destinations they followed up with for comment said that they didn’t feel the information on the page was complete enough to be showcased. But each member of the panel agreed, some is better than none, and a first step is a step in the right direction.

Allison Keeney, Consumer Communications manager with Travel Oregon suggests that content is a great place to start making things welcoming for travellers with disabilities. She suggests running an audit of your website to see if there are gaps about accessibility travel. 

For advisors, this could include how you work with people with specific needs. Additionally, look at how accessible your website is. Is it something a screen reader can navigate easily, with descriptions of images to help blind and low-vision clients? Have you used illustrations and images of people with a wide variety of abilities, to make everyone feel welcome and represented? 

Making Inclusive Travel 'Normal'

In conclusion, the panel reiterated how making travel inclusive for everyone is the goal. “Keep bringing us into your spaces,” said Durso.  “Instead of creating a separate space for us, bring us into your spaces and be thinking about how you can include us.” 

Rodriguez agrees. “I think it really is about changing the biases and accepting that we're people with exactly the same needs,” she said. “We all want to stay in beautiful places. We want to see the world. We want to have adventures. We want to have love. We want to live our lives. We want to celebrate and that becoming ‘the normal’ versus ‘the exception’ is probably the very, very, very beginning for me.”

For more of TravelPulse's recent coverage on accessible travel initiatives, see: Ensuring Seamless Adventures: How Celebrity Cruises is Transforming Accessibility at Sea and Billy Bishop Launches Sunflower Hidden Disability Program.

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