Compelling demographics, the need for industry engagement and for better auditing processes, and the glaring absence of accommodation providers were all features of New Zealand’s first Access Tourism conference.
But I was particularly interested in the claim by Bill Forrester that the issue is not so much accessible infrastructure as the way accessible tourism is not valued by both operators and promoters alike. He talked about going beyond grudgingly ‘accommodating’ disabled people to welcoming them and including them as business as usual in very real and tangible ways, to the point where statistics about their numbers were not collected.
This has set me thinking about the application of this perspective on access to our tourism industry and other areas of daily life, and I don’t just mean the built environment. This attitude persists despite some compelling figures. Twenty percent of the New Zealand population live with disability. By 2031 people over 65 will be 26% of the population with an accompanying increase in the disability rate. This is a significant market by anyone’s reckoning, even allowing for some overlap. In countries which are our main source of tourists the rapidly ageing population is even more marked.
Dr Sandra Rhodda, access tourism researcher says of the revenue value of the access tourism market, “In Canada, for example, pwds account for $25 billion in consumer spending and in Australia the accessible tourism market is believed to be worth around $4.8bn to the Australian economy.”
Is this blinkered attitude because the non-disabled youth market is cooler, sexier and more glamorous for the advertising industry, the marketers and the PR people, who seem to me to be mostly under 40, or is it simply that older and disabled people have been invisible for so long that it is hard to take us seriously, even when we have the dosh. Perhaps it is simply a failure of the imagination.
The only products marketed to people over fifty seem to be rest homes, erectile dysfunction medication, mobility scooters, anti-ageing creams and laxative drinks. Well whoop de do!
Perhaps the providers and marketers of tourism will wake up just in time to watch the tourist dollars disappearing over the horizon to more welcoming destinations.
