Abstract
PurposeDespite a growing interest in accessible tourism, delivering high-quality tourism experiences to people with disabilities (PwD) remains a major challenge. Beyond a number of acknowledged barriers (e.g. cultural, architectural, relational), the main issue is the lack of coordination amongst the many actors participating in the co-creation of tourism experiences. This paper intends to advance available knowledge on this issue by conceptually suggesting a solution that draws on the concepts of the tourism experience and digital ecosystems.Design/methodology/approachThis paper is developed as a conceptual contribution, drawing also on an illustrative example that considers a tourist with mobility disability as the focal actor.FindingsThe results indicate that a digital ecosystem could contribute to making tourism locations more accessible by enabling information sharing and coordination amongst all actors that co-create the tourism experiences. Moreover, the analysis underlines that tourism locations should be designed to be useable by all people, drawing on the principles of the universal design.Research limitations/implicationsThis paper describes a path to fostering accessible tourism, drawing on local authorities, particularly municipalities and universities. The suggested solution would benefit from future empirical analyses to assess its strengths and weaknesses.Originality/valueBy drawing on the concept of digital ecosystems, this paper is amongst the first studies to suggest a path to making tourism locations more accessible to all tourists (with or without disabilities) based on technology.
Highlights
Since the United Nations (1975) created the Declaration on the Rights of Disabled Persons, there has been increasing interest in the participation of people with disabilities (PwD) in tourism
This study presents a conceptual contribution that combines the stream of literature related to accessible tourism and service ecosystems to highlight the role of technology in enabling the co-creation of valuable tourism experiences for PwD
For several reasons, contributing to making tourism more accessible to PwD represents a priority for all the stakeholders involved in tourism, including those in the academic community
Summary
Since the United Nations (1975) created the Declaration on the Rights of Disabled Persons, there has been increasing interest in the participation of people with disabilities (PwD) in tourism. While technology has been usually considered an operand resource (i.e. an output), recent conceptualisations view technology as an operant resource (i.e. a process) that is able to influence ecosystems and value co-creation (Akaka and Vargo, 2014) While this view and the perspective of broader ecosystems have gained remarkable popularity in tourism studies, they have not yet been applied to research on accessible tourism. These arguments can be illustrated through the construction of the TCJ for a holiday that is independently conceived and designed by a person with mobility disability who has time to spend in a destination to be selected and does not want to rely on standardised offerings delivered by tour operators For this purpose, we draw on the general framework suggested by Baccarani and Cassia (2017), according to which a holiday is articulated and occurs in the following four main stages (Figure 1):. The first stage of the TCJ – destination choice and trip design – encompasses the formation of a tourist’s experiential expectations drawing on the following elements: 1. Destination choice and trip design
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