Update on national travel patterns from the UK

In an update to a previous post on new research coming out of the UK on the travel patterns of people with disabilities is the publication of a new resource called Accessible tourism: Making it work for your business (UK Department for Culture Media and Sport, 2010). The publication uses the first the data available from the UK tourism survey data. To summarise the report, there are over 11 million people in England with a disability (almost one in five people). Twelve per cent of “all overnight domestic trips in England between January and June 2009 were made by visitors with access needs, contributing almost £1bn to the economy” (2010, p3). This proportion of overall travel attributed to the accessible tourism market is almost identical to the US and Australian data (Dwyer & Darcy, 2008; Van Horn, 2007). What is interesting is that the data is only for the six-month period and when this data has gone through a full year of collection, the economic contribution is likely to double to £2bn. The travel expenditure data shows that people with disabilities have on average a longer trip (4 as opposed to 3 nights) and, hence, have a greater overall spend of £216 as opposed to £197. The report also comes with some excellent case studies that show the benefits of access provision to businesses. One example is an accessible accommodation provider whose occupancy is 97% as opposed to the regional average of 55%. We look forward to more data as it is published. A special thank you to Ivor Ambrose from ENAT for keeping us informed of European updates. 

References

Dwyer, L., & Darcy, S. (2008). Chapter 4 - Economic contribution of disability to tourism in Australia. In S. Darcy, B. Cameron, L. Dwyer, T. Taylor, E. Wong & A. Thomson (Eds.), Technical Report 90040: Visitor accessibility in urban centres (pp. 15-21). Gold Coast: Sustainable Tourism Cooperative Research Centre. http://www.crctourism.com.au/BookShop/BookDetail.aspx?d=626 

UK Department for Culture Media and Sport (2010). Accessible tourism: Making it work for your business Available from http://www.culture.gov.uk/images/publications/DCMS_Accessible_Tourism_Report.pdf

Van Horn, L. (2007). Disability Travel In The United States: Recent Research And Findings. Paper presented at the 11th International Conference on Mobility and Transport for Elderly and Disabled Persons (TRANSED) - "Benchmarking, Evaluation and Vision for the Future". , June 18-22, 2007, at the Palais des congrès de Montréal.