Business Travel Gets Serious About Accessibility

On consecutive working days last month BTN Europe published stories which give hope corporate travel is beginning to understand accessibility. First we reported Marriott International plans to make events more inclusive for neurodiverse people. Then American Express Global Business Travel unveiled IBM as its launch customer for an accessibility platform that includes a specialist assistance desk and the (voluntary) capture of data on travelers’ assistance requirements.

Meanwhile the Biden Administration is giving more attention to air accessibility, although it remains unfortunate that all too often improvement only comes when governments intervene. In July 2023, the Department of Transportation ruled that from 2033 new single-aisle aircraft will have to include a lavatory large enough for a passenger with disability plus an attendant to enter and maneuver. 

In September, as part of an agreement with the DOT following a government investigation into a disability complaint, United Airlines unveiled several improvements. These included adding a filter to its booking engine to indicate which flights can carry different kinds of wheelchair. United will also refund the fare difference if a wheelchair user who cannot be accommodated has to opt for a more expensive flight.

There is more to come, according to Roberto Castiglioni, director of consultancy Reduced Mobility Rights, which he founded after bad flying experiences with his disabled son. “There will be a ruling in the next few weeks that makes breakage of a wheelchair a default breach of the Air Carrier Access Act and therefore liable to an automatic fine of $27,500,” Castiglioni said. “That may put pressure on ground handlers especially to do their jobs better.”  A second proposal improving carriage of mobility devices will follow shortly afterwards, he added. 

Improvement certainly is needed. According to the DOT, major U.S. carriers and their partners reported the mishandling of 32,640 wheelchairs and scooters on domestic flights from 2019-2022.

Nor is the problem confined by any means to the U.S. Castiglioni said the UK-based television presenter Sophie Morgan, with whom he works, had wheelchairs broken four times in 2023. Wheelchair users also have horror stories of crawling down aircraft steps when no assistance shows up on arrival; or of booking accessible hotel rooms only to find they cannot even get to the room because of doorways that are too narrow.

But even when airlines and hotels do improve accessibility, too often their dedicated facilities and service are not visible or bookable through the travel distribution process—surely an issue demanding greater industry collaboration in 2024. 

A classic example is the Great Britain Paralympic swimmer Ellie Challis. Last month, the BBC reported she couldn’t access her Premier Inn first-floor hotel room because the lift had broken. The incident was unfortunate for Premier Inn: the property in question had accessible rooms on the ground floor. But standard rooms suit Challis’s needs better. The problem was, her father said, that he had no means of booking a standard room instead on the ground floor.

Meanwhile, AtkinsRéalis category manager Adam Hickingbotham started work last year on an accessible hotels program for employees. He soon discovered that many hotels do not load their accessible room inventory into global distribution systems. 

Hickingbotham has delayed launching the program until all rooms in it can be booked online. He is starting 2024 with meetings with GDSs, hotels and his travel management company. “I will get there. It’s just taking much longer than expected,” he said. 

Online booking tools need improvement too. Two speakers at an Institute of Travel Management conference session on accessibility last year called out booking tools for poor management of assistance services.

Some of that may not be the tools’ fault. Castiglioni says that whatever notes about disabilities are written free form into reservation systems, they end up in airline passenger service systems as four-letter codes. These codes are not always interpreted by handlers consistently, often because they are uninformative. DPNA, for example, meaning Disabled Person Needing Assistance, covers all invisible disabilities and therefore a vast range of needs. 

Work on a new process has started, said Castiglioni, but as is often the case with accessibility, should be going a lot faster. His message for travel managers is the same as for everyone else in the travel business: “Keep pushing suppliers to make the changes within reach, which is most of them. It’s just a question of saying yes, let’s do it.”