The Future of Inclusive Travel
Thank you to OnGig, a blog that normally covers disabilities in the workplace for venturing into People magazine territory by researching an exhaustive range of celebrities, business leaders, politicians, athletes as well paralympians who have a disability. See the full list here.
Our Takeaway: The disability community extends further than we realize. Are we creating spaces that welcome the guests we want to attract?
The Schoolhouse Hotel is revolutionary in the realm of accessible hotels. This vacation destination in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, has become the world’s first fully beyond ADA-compliant hotel, ensuring comfortable stays for neurodivergent individuals as well as those with mobility issues, blindness, and deafness. The Schoolhouse Hotel is focused on accessibility for everyone from the moment a guest books a room through its website, all the way through check-out. Learn more about their model and why they’re being celebrated here.
Our Takeaway: The Schoolhouse Hotel serves as a veritable showroom of innovations, products, and technology that makes every room accessible for a wide range of disabilities. Hotel developers should be making pilgrimages to see what’s next.
If you want to experience a hotel from a wheel-chair-users perspective and do an ADA compliance check at the same time, sit down and spend time in a wheelchair as an experiment in what guests with disabilities face. In 2018, the hotel manager at the Alfond Inn Hotel did just that–with some coaching from Sylvia Longmire, who writes about the accessibility of destinations in her travel blog, Spin the Globe.
Our Takeaway: This simple, educational experiment is a good reminder that there’s no better way to learn than by doing and experiencing a guest’s frustration first-hand. Find out what he learned, here.