Redesigning tourism for whom?

When we imagine the traveller of the future, who do we see?

There is something seductive about the language of progress.

We are told that travel is becoming frictionless. Artificial intelligence can build an itinerary before we have finished typing the question. Airports are becoming automated. Hotels know our preferences before we arrive. Algorithms can tell us where to eat, what to see and increasingly where we might want to go next.

The promise is irresistible: less uncertainty, less effort, more freedom. It is fitting that World Tourism Day 2026 approaches under the theme “Digital Agenda and Artificial Intelligence to Redesign Tourism".

We are, apparently, redesigning the way the world travels. But redesign is never neutral. Every system is built around an idea of the person who will use it. Every staircase, booking form, airport queue, hotel room, app and automated check-in contains assumptions about how a human body moves, communicates, processes information and responds to the unfamiliar.

So before celebrating the extraordinary intelligence of the tourism industry we are building, perhaps we should examine the traveller it appears to have in mind. Because if that traveller can walk the expected distance, tolerate the expected noise, stand in the expected queue, process information at the expected speed, navigate the expected technology and adapt when something unexpectedly changes, then perhaps the future is not quite as revolutionary as it looks. We may simply be digitising an old idea of who travel is for.

The fiction of the “normal” traveller

In August 2026, the World Health Organization reiterated that more than 1.3 billion people — around 16% of the world’s population — live with disability. The figure is difficult to reconcile with the way accessibility is still routinely positioned within tourism: as a specialist consideration, a particular customer segment or an additional service sitting somewhere beyond the experience designed for everybody else.

This division between the ordinary traveller and the traveller with “additional needs” is not as natural as it appears. It reflects a much older tendency to design environments around a relatively narrow conception of the human body and mind, and then describe everybody who cannot comfortably navigate those environments as requiring adaptation.

Over time, those assumptions become almost invisible. A staircase becomes architecture while a ramp becomes accessibility. A loud and crowded environment is treated as an ordinary public space while somewhere quiet becomes an accommodation. Standing for an extended period is accepted as part of queuing while an alternative arrangement becomes a special provision. The language is revealing because the supposedly neutral environment is rarely neutral at all. It simply happens to correspond with the abilities of the people imagined when it was designed.

This is why the social model of disability transformed thinking about accessibility so profoundly. Rather than locating disability exclusively within an individual’s impairment, it asks us to examine what happens when human difference meets environments constructed around a limited definition of normality. Tourism provides an unusually clear illustration.

A wheelchair user is not prevented from entering a restaurant by the existence of their wheelchair but by the decision, deliberate or otherwise, to make stairs the only route inside. An autistic traveller is not inherently incapable of experiencing a museum because they process sensory information differently; their access may instead be restricted by an environment in which intense noise, crowds or lighting are unavoidable and information about those conditions is unavailable beforehand. The distinction matters because it changes where responsibility sits. Instead of continually asking how the traveller might be accommodated within the environment, we begin asking why the environment was designed to exclude them in the first place.

The invisible labour behind the effortless holiday

There is a particular irony in the way tourism markets spontaneity.

The holiday is sold as escape: the moment at which ordinary responsibilities recede and somebody else takes care of the details. Yet for many disabled and neurodivergent travellers, reaching that point can require a level of preparation that sits almost entirely outside the industry’s romantic image of travel.

Before a hotel is booked, somebody may have spent hours examining photographs for evidence of bathroom access because useful measurements were unavailable. A route that appears straightforward on a map may require investigation through Street View because “five minutes from the station” says nothing about steps, gradients or uneven surfaces. An attraction’s reviews may become an unofficial source of sensory information because its own website says nothing about noise or crowds. None of this labour is particularly visible.

It takes place privately, before departure and frequently before money changes hands. It therefore falls outside many of the metrics through which tourism organisations understand their customers.

Statistics Canada offered a revealing glimpse of this problem in research published in 2025. Among surveyed travellers with disabilities or long-term conditions who had taken an out-of-town journey involving plane, train, bus or ferry travel, 40% experienced at least one barrier at a terminal or station, while 34% experienced at least one onboard. Potential accessibility barriers had also discouraged or prevented some respondents from travelling at all. The findings relate to Canada and should not be mistaken for a global prevalence estimate. Their wider significance lies elsewhere.

Tourism is relatively good at counting the people who arrive. It is much less capable of counting the people who never came.

The traveller who abandons a booking because they cannot establish whether the bathroom is usable does not appear in a hotel’s accessibility complaints. The family that decides an attraction presents too much sensory uncertainty never arrives at customer services to explain why. The passenger who concludes that an assistance process is too unreliable may simply choose another form of transport, another destination or no journey at all.

Absence is remarkably easy to mistake for lack of demand.

That creates a circular problem. Accessibility remains underdeveloped because organisations perceive limited demand, while the very barriers they have failed to address may be suppressing the demand they expect to see.

Information is infrastructure

Perhaps this is why one of tourism’s least glamorous accessibility problems deserves considerably more attention.

Information.

The phrase “accessible room” illustrates the problem perfectly. It sounds reassuring while communicating remarkably little about the actual environment a traveller will encounter. A room can be described as accessible without explaining whether the route from the street is step-free, whether there is sufficient transfer space beside the toilet, whether the shower has a threshold, whether the bed can accommodate a mobile hoist or whether the lift is large enough for a particular mobility device. The label asks the traveller to accept somebody else’s interpretation of accessibility.

For neurodivergent travellers, the information gap may concern something entirely different.

A person might need to understand how crowded an environment becomes, whether music is played continuously, what an airport security process will involve, whether an alternative to a long queue exists or whether somewhere quieter is available if sensory demands become overwhelming. The importance of this information extends beyond convenience.

Information changes the relationship between the traveller and the institution. When meaningful information is absent, the traveller becomes dependent upon somebody else to interpret an environment for them. They must disclose, enquire, explain and often wait for another person to decide whether their requirements can be met. Specific information returns some of that authority to the traveller.

They can make the decision themselves.

This is why accessibility information should be understood as infrastructure rather than customer-service decoration. A measurement, photograph or accurate description can create independence in much the same way as a physical adaptation because both alter what a person is able to do without requiring somebody else’s permission.

The accessibility conversation has outgrown the wheelchair symbol

For decades, public representations of accessibility have been dominated by the wheelchair symbol. Its importance is undeniable, but its ubiquity has also encouraged an extraordinarily narrow understanding of what access can mean.

Recent research into neurodivergent travel complicates that picture.

Booking.com published research in 2025 involving more than 27,000 prospective travellers across 33 countries and territories, including 5,601 respondents who identified as neurodivergent. Among those respondents, 49% reported having encountered a negative experience while travelling, while 76% wanted designated quiet spaces within airports, hotels and other key travel environments. The study was commercially commissioned and its sample should not be interpreted as representing every neurodivergent person globally.

What is particularly interesting, however, is the nature of what respondents wanted. Much of it concerned predictability.

This is significant because tourism has traditionally romanticised the unfamiliar. Surprise, novelty and spontaneity are sold as intrinsic parts of the experience, yet this assumes that uncertainty carries roughly the same cost for everybody. It does not.

For some travellers, knowing what will happen at airport security, understanding what an environment is likely to sound like or seeing photographs of an unfamiliar space beforehand does not diminish the adventure of travel. It makes the adventure possible.

As Matthias Schmid, Booking.com’s Senior Vice President of Accommodations, observed when discussing the research, the industry needs to understand “the lived experience behind the data".

There is an interesting irony in that phrase.

Few industries have embraced consumer data as enthusiastically as tourism. Platforms know what travellers search for, which photographs they click, which destinations they consider and what they eventually purchase. Artificial intelligence promises to make this knowledge increasingly sophisticated. Yet an industry capable of predicting where somebody might want to spend their next holiday can remain remarkably poor at explaining whether they will be able to use the bathroom when they arrive.

The great promise — and inconvenient limitation — of artificial intelligence

This is where artificial intelligence becomes genuinely interesting for accessible travel. Its potential lies not merely in recommending destinations but in reducing the enormous informational burden currently carried by travellers themselves. Information that may presently require hours of searching could, theoretically, be assembled and interpreted within seconds. A traveller might ask for accommodation that is step-free from the pavement, has sufficient transfer space beside the toilet and provides adequate clearance beneath the bed. Another might ask when a museum is likely to be least crowded, what an airport security process involves or where quieter areas exist within a terminal.

That would represent a meaningful redistribution of independence. But there is an inconvenient limitation beneath this optimistic vision: artificial intelligence cannot reliably interpret information that the tourism industry has never collected.

If a hotel’s database contains nothing more sophisticated than an “accessible” checkbox, an algorithm cannot infer the dimensions of the bathroom. If an attraction has never documented its sensory environment, technology cannot responsibly determine whether that environment will work for a particular traveller. The quality of artificial intelligence is therefore entangled with the quality of the information beneath it.

This exposes something rather less glamorous than the technological revolution promised by World Tourism Day.

Before tourism can build extraordinarily intelligent systems for interpreting accessibility information, it may first need to undertake the decidedly ordinary work of collecting it properly.

Sometimes the future of accessible travel depends on sophisticated artificial intelligence. Sometimes somebody simply needs to measure the doorway.

The politics of the frictionless journey

There is another word that deserves scrutiny: frictionless.

Modern tourism has become captivated by the idea of the seamless journey. Mobile boarding passes, automated border gates, app-based hotel check-in, QR-code menus and chatbot customer service all promise to remove the small inconveniences that interrupt movement. For many travellers, they genuinely do. But friction does not necessarily disappear simply because a system becomes more efficient. It can move.

A self-service process may save thousands of passengers several minutes while creating a substantial new barrier for somebody whose assistive technology cannot interact with it.

Removing a staffed service may reduce operating costs and waiting times while simultaneously removing the person capable of responding when a traveller’s access requirement falls outside the categories anticipated by the machine. This is why efficiency is never purely technical. It is also distributive.

The relevant question is not simply whether a system has reduced inconvenience, but whose inconvenience it has reduced and where the remaining inconvenience has been placed.

Technology therefore tells us something about institutional priorities. Systems reveal whose time is considered valuable, whose independence is anticipated and whose difficulty is treated as an acceptable consequence of progress.

From accommodation to expectation

Beneath debates about ramps, quiet spaces, websites and artificial intelligence lies a more fundamental question about the relationship between the traveller and the tourism industry.

Who is expected to adapt to whom? For generations, the answer has largely been the traveller.

The environment remains fixed while the person who does not fit it requests an adjustment. The wheelchair user books assistance. The Deaf traveller seeks another communication route. The neurodivergent traveller explains why an apparently ordinary environment presents a barrier.Individual accommodations will always matter because human needs cannot be reduced to a universal checklist. The problem emerges when accommodation becomes the entire philosophy of accessibility.

There is a profound difference between an organisation saying “we can make an exception for you” and creating an environment that communicates “we expected people like you to be here".

The first asks the traveller to identify themselves as an exception to the norm.The second questions the narrowness of the norm itself. This distinction matters particularly in tourism because travel is not merely the movement of bodies between geographical locations. It is participation in public and cultural life: restaurants, beaches, museums, streets, hotels, transport systems and the countless ordinary experiences through which a destination becomes knowable.

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities recognises this explicitly. Article 30 connects equal participation in cultural life, recreation and leisure with access to tourism venues.

Accessibility is therefore not an act of hospitality bestowed upon a particular kind of guest. It is part of the architecture of participation.

What would redesign actually mean?

In his message for World Tourism Day 2026, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres offers a deceptively simple principle: “Technology must serve humanity".

The sentence becomes more demanding the longer one considers it. If technology is to serve humanity, the people imagined within that humanity cannot be restricted to those who already navigate existing systems with relative ease. Redesign would therefore mean involving disabled and neurodivergent people before technologies and environments are finalised rather than inviting them afterwards to identify the barriers.

It would mean recognising that accurate information can be as consequential as physical infrastructure and that technological convenience should expand the ways people can participate rather than quietly eliminating alternatives. It would also require the tourism industry to become more comfortable with specificity.

A hotel that describes precisely where its accessibility ends may ultimately give a traveller more autonomy than one confidently claiming to be “accessible for everyone”. The first provides information from which a person can make a decision. The second provides reassurance without necessarily providing knowledge.

There is something important in that distinction.

True inclusion does not require an organisation to pretend that every environment works for every human being. It requires enough honesty, information and thoughtfulness for people to understand whether it works for them.

Progress for whom?

There is much worth celebrating about tourism. Travel allows people to encounter languages, landscapes, communities and ways of living beyond their own. At its best, it can disturb assumptions about the world precisely because it exposes us to lives that do not resemble ours.

Perhaps there is a certain irony, then, in an industry built upon encountering human difference remaining so capable of designing around human sameness.

As World Tourism Day 2026 approaches, we are invited to imagine how artificial intelligence and digital technology might redesign tourism. We should embrace the ambition of that question while resisting the temptation to equate technological sophistication with progress itself.

A five-second check-in is progress for the traveller who can use it. An intelligent itinerary is progress for the traveller whose requirements exist within the data. A frictionless airport is progress only if the friction has genuinely disappeared rather than being transferred onto somebody whose experience is less visible.

The danger is not that tourism will fail to innovate. It plainly will. The danger is that we become so captivated by the sophistication of what we are building that we fail to interrogate the assumptions buried underneath it.

Perhaps the true opportunity presented by this moment is therefore not simply to make existing tourism faster, smarter or more personalised, but to reconsider the person for whom those systems have historically been designed. Because the most radical promise of innovation is surely not that people who already move comfortably through the world can move through it slightly faster. It is that the boundaries of who gets to participate can become wider. And so, as we approach World Tourism Day and look towards an extraordinarily intelligent future of travel, perhaps the question we should be asking is this:

If technology makes tourism easier than ever before, but the same people are still required to work the hardest simply to access it, can we really call that progress?

Sources

World Health Organization (WHO), Disability, 10 August 2026 — WHO’s current estimate that more than 1.3 billion people, approximately 16% of the global population, live with disability.

United Nations, World Tourism Day — Secretary-General’s Message 2026 — António Guterres on the 2026 theme, “Digital Agenda and Artificial Intelligence to Redesign Tourism”, including the principle that “Technology must serve humanity.”

Statistics Canada, Accessibility related barriers to travel among persons with disabilities or long-term conditions, 27 May 2025 — national findings examining accessibility barriers experienced during travel and the effect of anticipated barriers on travel decisions.

Booking.com, Research Highlights the More Inclusive Must Haves for Neurodivergent Travelers, 17 March 2025 — international research across 33 countries and territories, including 5,601 respondents identifying as neurodivergent. Survey fieldwork was conducted in July and August 2024.

United Nations, Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, Article 30 — participation in cultural life, recreation, leisure and tourism.

© 2025. All rights reserved.

YELLOW FLOWER TRAVEL & TOURS LTD.

Accessibility Matters

Contact us:

info@yellowflowertravel.com

+44 7940 764818