VisitEngland is working with AccessAble to support hospitality and tourism businesses across England to provide detailed descriptions of their venue accessibility for visitors.
Through AccessAble’s new Your Accessibility Guide portal, businesses can book and pay for either a guided or on-site assessment of their venue, where a professional surveyor will create a quality-assured Detailed Access Guide.
VisitEngland Director Andrew Stokes said: “Our research confirms that today’s travellers with health conditions and impairments want detailed descriptions of venues’ accessibility to help make decisions. These new guides provide clear, quality-assured information, supporting them to make the best choices. By making these user-friendly guides available on AccessAble’s website, attractions, accommodation providers and other tourism businesses can tap into this valuable market further. I encourage tourism businesses in England to sign up via the portal.”
Minister for Disabled People, Health and Work, Mims Davies MP said: "These new guides are a welcome move forward in improving access to the fantastic sights our country has to offer, helping disabled people make informed choices and supporting our hospitality and tourism businesses to tap into a vital market.
“With initiatives like our Disability Action Plan and National Disability Strategy, this Government is committed to making the UK the most accessible country for people to live, work and thrive. It is excellent to see VisitEngland and AccessAble working together to further this vision and tackle the barriers preventing disabled people from benefiting from, and contributing to, every aspect of our society.”
Image: The Grand Pier at Weston-super-Mare
Dr Gregory Burke, Founder and Executive Chair of AccessAble, said: “For 25 years, listening to the lived experience and expertise of disabled people has been at the heart of everything AccessAble does.
“Disabled people have been contacting us to say they are facing a postcode lottery when it comes to accessibility information. At the same time, we have had significant numbers of venues across the UK asking to join our service.
“The Your Accessibility Guide portal is our answer. We are thrilled to be working in partnership with VisitEngland to enable tourism and hospitality businesses to provide quality assured accessibility information.”
The guides will be published and searchable on AccessAble’s website, currently used by more than six million people a year, with businesses also receiving an Accessibility Improvement Report.
VisitEngland is providing discounts to tourism businesses who wish to sign up via the new portal, which will be allocated on a first come first served basis.
Tourism is one of England’s largest and most valuable industries, supporting hundreds of thousands of small-to-medium sized businesses, employing 2.6 million people and generating £66 billion for the economy in domestic visitor spending in 2022.
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