AIR TRAVEL AND DISABILITY - ONGOING DILEMMAS, DISCRIMINATION AND LOSS OF DIGNITY IN NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL MOBILITY

Over the last three years a number of papers have been published that contribute to understanding one of the most basic links in the travel “trip chain" (World Health Organization & World Bank, 2011) for people with disability - airline travel. Air travel is the lifeblood of contemporary tourism that has been democratised through the advent of low-cost travel (Doganis, 2005). Yet, media coverage of national and international air travel experiences highlight the adverse flight experiences of people with disabilities are ongoing and a global problem. Two recent examples from Europe (European Disability Forum, 2011) and New Zealand (The Dominion Post, 2011) highlights some of the issues that people with mobility and vision impairments. What these incidents highlight is critical service failure by airlines that is not ad hoc but characterised by systematic failure within their service blueprint (Shostack, 1993).

Over the coming week I will present the abstracts of articles that examine disability, air travel and the accessible tourism. The first provides an overview of the flight experiences of people with disabilities in Israel involving people with mobility and vision disabilities (Poria, Reichel, & Brandt, 2010). The second involves the physical infrastructure required to provide a seamless "trip chain" for people with disability in air travel in Taiwan (Chang & Chen, 2012). The third examines the resultant effect that disabling practices have on the embodiment of people with disability through phenomenology or essence of experience in Australia (Darcy, 2012). Lastly, a chapter from a book on accessible tourism examines the impact that low-cost airlines may have on the critical service elements of the air travel experience drawing examples across the Asia-Pacific (Darcy & Ravinder, 2012).

While these articles identified a number of serious issues that have resulted in lack of accessibility, physical injury, loss of dignity and discriminatory service attitude, air travel can be an enjoyable experience. On a recent trip to Italy I had nothing but an extraordinary level of service at both Milan and Rome International airports facilitated by a dedicated service support group provided across all airlines for people with disabilities. Photo 1 shows my service team who provided me from arriving at the check-in counter to being seated on the plane a continuous service experience. This service is provided no matter what airline I would have been travelling on. I liken the experience to being serviced by a Formula 1 pit crew, totally professional, courteous and the highest levels of service provision. Fantastico!

Photo 1: Author Simon Darcy with the ADR Assistance team on the light rail transferring to the boarding gate (© Fiona Darcy 2012 é)

What I subsequently learnt from my colleague Ivor Ambrose from the European Network For Accessible Tourism was that for all airports with over 100,000 pasengers per year, this was a requirement brought in by EU REGULATION (EC) No 1107/2006  which came into force in 2007. As Ivor states “Gradually the implementation of this Regulation is working and improving... although the way it is carried out varies from country to country, as you might expect, according to training practices etc. But the good thing is that all airlines are covered by it - for all incoming and outgoing flights in the European Union”.

Well done Europe!

The rest of the world has a lot to learn. On the same trip where I had an awesome experience travelling from Italy to Hong Kong and then to Australia, my experiences in Hong Kong and Australia have always been ad hoc depending upon the individuals on for the airlines that I am travelling with. I've had everything from first-class transfer experience right through to being dropped in the transfer process. These types of experiences and take the gloss off what should be a wonderful travel experience.

References

Buhalis, D., & Darcy, S. (Eds.). (2011). Accessible Tourism: Concepts and Issues. Bristol, UK: Channel View Publications.

Chang, Y.-C., & Chen, C.-F. (2012). Meeting the needs of disabled air passengers: Factors that facilitate help from airlines and airports. Tourism Management, 33(3), 529-536.

Darcy, S. (2012). (dis)embodied air travel experiences: Disability, discrimination and the affect of a discontinuous air travel chain. Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Management, 19(e8 August), 1-11.

Darcy, S., & Ravinder, R. (2012). Air travel for people with disabilities. In D. Buhalis, S. Darcy & I. Ambrose (Eds.), Best practice in accessible tourism: Inclusion, disability, ageing population and tourism (pp. 207-219). Bristol, UK: Channel View Publications.

Doganis, R. (2005). The airline business: Routledge.

European Disability Forum. (2011, 15 April). Clear violation of eu regulation leads to discrimination of passengers with disabilities Retrieved 23 April, 2011, from http://www.edf-feph.org/Page_Generale.asp?DocID=13855&thebloc=27020

Poria, Y., Reichel, A., & Brandt, Y. (2010). The flight experiences of people with disabilities: An exploratory study. Journal of Travel Research, 49(2), 216-227.

Shostack, G. L. (1993). How to design a service. European Journal of Marketing, 16(1), 49-63.

The Dominion Post. (2011, 13 April 2011). 'Humiliated': Jetstar slammed over refusing to fly disabled passengers, Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved from http://www.smh.com.au/travel/travel-news/humiliated-jetstar-slammed-over-refusing-to-fly-disabled-passengers-20110413-1ddm0.html

World Health Organization, & World Bank. (2011). World report on disability, from http://www.who.int/disabilities/world_report/2011/report/en/index.html

Numbers of People with Disabilities who Travel: Disability and tourism statistics

A lot of people ask me “how many people with disabilities travel?”. From a research perpective, there is no definitive answer to this question. There are however estimates firmly based in the research literature and then there are guestimates. My suggestion for maintaining credibility with the industry is to be very wary of “guestimates” (anecdotal reports) and to stick strictly to what has been verified in the research literature. For example, when I was doing my PhD in the area (Darcy, 2004) the figure that everybody referenced was Durgin, Lindsay, and Hamilton (1985) who referred to secondary data of the 35 million Americans with disabilities and "estimated" that 13 percent of all travellers in the US had some form of ‘handicap’. Yet, when I went to the publication they had "guessed" that this would be the case and had not carried out any empirical work to validate this figure.

Photo 1: Types of Disability of those Travelling in Australia (Source: Dwyer & Darcy, 2008)

The main early study was Woodside and Etzel (1980) who undertook the first empirical study on disability and tourism that sought to discover the role of physical and mental conditions on tourism vacation behaviour. The survey found that 10 percent of the 590 respondents to a household survey in the US State of South Carolina who had gone on a trip had a member of their party with a ‘physical or mental condition’. They concluded that while the demographic characteristics of those travelling did not vary significantly from other households, that those with a person with a disability had lower level of travel than the general population.

For a summary of the literature see pages 5-6 and Chapter 4 pp21-32 in the following is publication (Darcy, et al., 2008). This was written and researched with the preeminent tourism economist Professor Larry Dwyer. 
Darcy, S., Cameron, B., Dwyer, L., Taylor, T., Wong, E., & Thomson, A. (2008), Technical Report 90040: Visitor accessibility in urban centre. Gold Coast: Sustainable Tourism Cooperative Research Centre. http://www.crctourism.com.au/BookShop/BookDetail.aspx?d=626

This work presented a detailed methodology for assessing the economic contribution of tourists with disabilities based on nationally collected data on their travel patterns. Only the Australia government's Bureau of Tourism Research (2003 now Tourism Research Australia) have collected data at a national level that allows comparison between the rates of travel for people with disabilities and the general population. The above study was based on these figures. It also shows the complexity when understanding that of this study estimated that about 11% of Australians travelling with in Australia (domestic holidaymakers) have a disability. Figure 1 presents a breakdown of the types of disability that travellers identified that they had. This proportion dropped significantly for those travelling internationally. That is where the complexity lies when trying to estimate the proportion of travellers with disabilities as part of inbound markets. The other excellent data set is from the US Open Doors Organisation (HarrisInteractive Market Research, 2003, 2005) both our study and these studies suggests that about 7% international travellers have some form of disability. However, these travellers have lower levels of support needs than domestic travellers. 



There are also studies that seek to make the economic impact of travellers with disabilities of which the above study did as well. However, most of these other studies use gross demand estimates rather than undertaking direct empirical work about the consumer behaviour of people with disabilities tourism participation and patterns. For example Neuman and Reuber’s

(2004) estimated German tourists make a €2.5 billion contribution to the economy where the European Union countries’ OSSATE research estimated that tourists with disabilities contribute €80 billion to the economy using gross demand estimates (Buhalis, Michopoulou, Eichhorn, & Miller, 2005). More recently VisitEngland has collected data that suggests

“overnight trips made by, or accompanied by, someone with a health condition or impairment contributed almost £1bn to the English domestic visitor economy in the first 6 months of the year, accounting for 5.7 million trips in total. These latest figures highlight the importance of considering people with access needs, who in the year to June 2009 have accounted for 12% of all overnight domestic trips” (ENAT, 2009).

This report has the potential of making a valuable contribution to the field and we look forward to public release.

For a detailed examination of the research literature see pages 89-96 of
Darcy, Simon 2004, Disabling Journeys: The social relations of tourism for people with impairments in Australia – an explanation of people with impairments’ experiences through the discourses of government tourism authorities and the tourism industry, Unpublished Ph.D Thesis, Faculty of Business, University of Technology, Sydney. http://utsescholarship.lib.uts.edu.au/iresearch/scholarly-works/handle/2100/260

For an introduction to understanding the accessible tourism market see

Darcy, S. (2006), Setting a Research Agenda for Accessible  Tourism, Gold Coast: Sustainable Tourism Cooperative Research Centre.http://www.crctourism.com.au/BookShop/BookDetail.aspx?d=473

References

Buhalis, D., Michopoulou, E., Eichhorn, V., & Miller, G. (2005). Accessibility market and stakeholder analysis - One-Stop-Shop for Accessible Tourism in Europe (OSSATE). Surrey, United Kingdom: University of Surrey.

Bureau of Tourism Research (2003). National visitor survey: travel by Australians Retrieved 10 September, 2007, from www.btr.gov.au

Darcy, S. (2004). Disabling Journeys: the Social Relations of Tourism for People with Impairments in Australia - an analysis of government tourism authorities and accommodation sector practices and discourses, Faculty of Business Available from http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/dspace/handle/2100/260

Darcy, S. (2006). Setting a Research Agenda for Accessible Tourism. In C. Cooper, T. D. LacY & L. Jago (Eds.), STCRC Technical Report Seriespp. 48). Available from http://www.crctourism.com.au/BookShop/BookDetail.aspx?d=473

Darcy, S., Cameron, B., Dwyer, L., Taylor, T., Wong, E., & Thomson, A. (2008). Technical Report 90064: Visitor accessibility in urban centrespp. 75). Available from http://www.crctourism.com.au/BookShop/BookDetail.aspx?d=626

Durgin, R. W., Lindsay, N., & Hamilton, F. (1985). A Guide to Recreation, Leisure and Travel for the Handicapped Volume 2: Travel and Transportation. Toledo, Ohio: Resource Directories.

ENAT (2009). UK Tourism Firms Encouraged to Improve Accessibility Retrieved 26 December, 2009, from http://www.accessibletourism.org/?i=enat.en.news.713

HarrisInteractive Market Research (2003). Research among adults with disabilities - travel and hospitality. Chicago: Open Doors Organization.

HarrisInteractive Market Research (2005). Research among adults with disabilities - travel and hospitality. Chicago: Open Doors Organization.

Neumann, P., & Reuber, P. (2004). Economic Impulses of Accessible Tourism for All (Vol. 526). Berlin: Study commissioned by the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology & Federal Ministry of Economic and Labour (BMWA).

Woodside, A. G., & Etzel, M. J. (1980). Impact of physical and mental handicaps on vacation travel behaviour. Journal of Travel Research, 18(3), 9-11.