Abstract
This article addresses issues regarding the intention of responsible tourism to increase the accessibility of tourist destinations for children with disabilities and their families. The main objective of this research is to identify the barriers that families with disabled children confront during their touristic experiences and to find ways to diminish these barriers. In this respect, qualitative marketing research based on the focus group method was conducted. The research results revealed that the most important barriers faced by such families are attitude barriers, followed by physical barriers and a lack of information. Starting from these results, we proposed the higher involvement of national authorities and other stakeholders in strategies meant to decrease or remove the barriers faced by people with disabilities and their attendants in order to develop responsible tourism. Such strategies could firstly involve the development of a primary school curriculum by including educational programs that are meant to avoid attitude barriers. Secondly, other stakeholders could use new emerging technologies, such as virtual reality, to offer tourists the opportunity to experience some tourism products and places before they travel.
Highlights
According to the Cape Town Declaration, responsible tourism means “making better places for people to live in and better places for people to visit” and involves responsibilities for all the stakeholders in the hospitality field towards a common goal: to make tourism more sustainable
The preoccupation with studying tourists with special needs represents both a form of responsible tourism and a way to help achieve the United Nations’ the sustainable development goals, while the statistics regarding persons with disabilities at the beginning of 2018 reflect that more than a billion people—15% of the world’s population—had a form of disability [5], with at least 10% being children and 80% living in developing countries [6]
Considering the research questions - mentioned before - and based on the literature review, the research objectives were set, as follows: (1) Evaluating the attitude barriers faced by families of children with disabilities in relation with other stakeholders from tourism during the trips they carried out as tourists; (2) Identifying the main physical barriers that make the participation of persons with disabilities to tourists activities harder; (3) Identifying some ideas regarding possibilities of diminishing the attitude barriers for families with disabled children; (4) Finding opportunities to use virtual reality (VR) in order to help families with disabled children to identify and to avoid physical barriers in tourism activities
Summary
According to the Cape Town Declaration, responsible tourism means “making better places for people to live in and better places for people to visit” and involves responsibilities for all the stakeholders in the hospitality field (tour operators, hoteliers, governments, local people, tourists, etc.) towards a common goal: to make tourism more sustainable. Two of the many forms of responsible tourism recognized by the Cape Town Declaration are the provision of more enjoyable experiences for tourists and access for people with disabilities [1]. The preoccupation with studying tourists with special needs represents both a form of responsible tourism and a way to help achieve the United Nations’ the sustainable development goals, while the statistics regarding persons with disabilities at the beginning of 2018 reflect that more than a billion people—15% of the world’s population—had a form of disability [5], with at least 10% being children and 80% living in developing countries [6]
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