After my blog post yesterday about the launch of accessible.travel Cape Town I am even slightly surprised myself to be able to announce the launch of accessible.travel Melbourne today!

We still have some work to do on both destination pages such as add maps and bathroom sketches but the basic information regarding a few hotels is there. Thanks to our collaborator Bill Forrester, Director of Travability and our web designer, Quim Mañas Marsiñach, of cmpst, for all their hard work.

Below: Melbourne, provided by Bill Forrester through the accessible.travel Community.

With the amazing help of Monica Guy here on the accessible.travel Community and the owner of Accessible Cape Town, we have been able to launch the accessible.travel Cape Town destination page. There’s still a lot of work for us to do in South Africa and a lot of information to collect, but now we have four hotels for you to choose from with varying levels of facilities for people with disabilities.

Below: accessible.travel Community member Scott Rains on Safari in South Africa earlier this month.

Brussels will also be launched as a destination accessible.travel early next week with another 5 hotels to choose from. Another member of the accessible.travel Community, Bill Forrester, has been collecting hotel data and information with us in Melbourne and all of this has just been sent to the accessible.travel designer to be published.

Ian Chill has also been sending us some great information about accessible hotels in Cairns as well as posting information in the accessible.travel Community Cairns Group. I’ll announce when Cairns is available with instant hotel booking here on the blog as soon as it’s ready. Another collaborator with the accessible.travel project is Hartmut Smikac and will be helping us collect information in Germany, Austria and Hungary. Again in Europe, Luis Varela from Accessible Portugal has agreed to work with us, this time in Portuguese capital, Lisbon. Luis is the latest person to agree to work with us and I’m really looking forward to working with him further.

Hartmut has also translated our audit forms into German and Loretta Jaumandreu has translated them into Spanish making it easier for us to work with local people with disabilities at destinations that speak these languages.

If you would like to get more involved with the accessible.travel project and help us collect information about hotels, attractions, museums, bars, restaurants, nightclubs and transport where you live and earn commissions for the work you do, please contact me through my profile.

Craig

The radio interview on Wisconsin Public Radio’s Here on Earth show with Scott Rains and myself is now available:

Interview and Links

Podcast

I’ve just finished an interview with regards to inclusive travel for people with disabilities and accessible.travel on Wisconsin Public Radio on their show “Here on Earth” with Scott Rains. A podcast of the interview will be available in the next couple of day and I’ll post it as soon as I can. In the meantime here’s some information about the interview from Here on Earth.

Today I saw an interesting article named “America’s 10 Most Walkable Cities” from The Daily Green. I’m curious as to whether the 10 most walkable cities are also the most accessible for people with disabilities.

You can vote for the most accessible US city on the accessible.travel Community (it will only take a minute to sign up and it’s completely free). Below is a picture of the accessible.travel Poll with the different city options, you cannot vote here on the blog, please join the accessible.travel Community and go to my profile page to vote.

Craig

I am pleased to announce a new partnership between accessible.travel and tripwolf to support each other in our work.

Tripwolf is a social travel guide for the discerning traveler that combines professional editorial travel content with user generated content – a collection of experiences from thousands of travelers worldwide. With tripwolf, travelers can generate their own customized 10-20 page travel guide based on their individual preferences and recommendations from friends and “trip gurus.”

I have been involved with tripwolf since their launch and have always tried to provide information for travellers with disabilities on their site. I am thrilled that they are suppporting accessible.travel in order to be able to provide their own community users with useful information about travelling with a disability.

We hope to be able to cross reference the hotels that both sites use so that tripwolf users with disabilities can find reliable information about accommodation with facilities for people with disabilities and make reservations with us.

Thanks to tripwolf for their continued support and everyone involved in accessible.travel is very excited about this new partnership.

Welcome to the March 2009 issue of the Global Access News Travel E-Zine. Thanks to everyone for taking the time to write us and share your travel tips and experiences.

1. ACCESSIBLE TRAVEL

Craig Grimes, who operates the excellent www.accessiblebarcelona.com is now offering a new site, Accessible Travel, http://www.accessible.travel/ It features access information on hotels in San Francisco, as well as Paris, London, Prague and additional European cities. Grimes intends to eventually expand his site to include a host of other destinations, which will surely prove a boon to disabled travelers.

Also mentioned in Global Access News this month is our other web page AccessibleNicaragua:

4. ACCESSIBLE NICARAGUA

Craig Grimes, of Accessible Barcelona and Accessible Travel, takes on access in Nicaragua. It is always so encouraging to see new regions like Nicaragua open up to disabled travelers. At last, we can put Central America on our itineraries. Visit www.accessiblenicaragua.com

Source: GLOBAL ACCESS NEWS TRAVEL E-ZINE, VOLUME X, NUMBER 3, March 2009

Disability NOW (Greece) have posted about accessible.travel in their forum in Greek!

An article about accessible.travel in the Travel Biz Monitor (India)

Accessible.travel, instant hotel booking engine for People with Disabilities likely to launch in India by year-end
By Khushboo Sahrawat | Mumbai

Accessible.travel, the world’s first instant hotel booking engine for People with Disabilities (PwDs) was launched last month by Craig Grimes, Director, Accessible.travel. Talking about the new initiative, Craig Grimes told TravelBiz Monitor, “The booking engine is different in terms of data provided regarding access and facilities for People with Disabilities at the hotels listed on the site. This has never been done before in a commercial way along with facility of instant booking.”

Read more.

Source: Travel Biz Monitor