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 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.

The European Network for Accessible Toursim (ENAT) talk about accessible.travel in a blog post today. ENAT have been very supportive of accessible.travel and have shared access data for various destinations.

Without ENAT accessible.travel wouldn’t have got to this point so quickly and I look forward to working with them more in the future. I’ll keep you all posted through the blog about developments with ENAT, of which, I am hoping that there will be many in the not too distant future.

(photo provided by Jani Nayar from SATH)

One of the key destinations for accessible.travel in the US will be New York. Unfortunately for us and for people with disabilities there isn’t very much information out there on the world wide web. Just trying to find a hotel with the right facilities is an absolute nightmare, I went to NYC in July last year and ticked the “wheelchair friendly” search box on a well known booking engine. This was a big mistake and I should have known better, I did email the hotel to confirm the access but they never replied and it would have been very expensive to call the hotel from Nicaragua, so I never did.

I arrived at the hotel at about midnight to be confronted with 6 steps and no alternative entrance. The situation got worse when I realised that the lift was so narrow that my wheelchair wouldn’t go through the doors and they had put me in a room on the fifth floor. All of the ground floor rooms were fully occupied but it wouldn’t have mattered anyway as the bathroom doors were so narrow that I couldn’t get in there either. They ended up putting me in another of their hotels that only had three steps to get into it and a lift that was wide enough for my chair. The hotel didn’t offer me any type of compensation, they didn’t even offer to pay for a taxi to the new hotel. It was only through the generosity of a French backpacker that I managed to get to the new hotel as he carried my rucksack and showed me the way. The service was appalling and the staff were rude, definitely not “wheelchair friendly” nor friendly towards anyone from what I could gather with the arguments from unhappy clients at the front desk.

This is the type of situation that accessible.travel wants to make a thing of the past through providing detailed hotel assessments and photos, so that individuals can make their own decisions as to whether a hotel is suitable for their needs or not.

With this in mind accessible.travel are trying to raise the funding so that I can go on a two week trip there to assess hotels, attractions,  transport facilities, bars and restaurants and are looking for businesses that maybe interested in sponsoring the accessible.travel New York pages.

What we require:

• Return flights to NYC from Central America
• Accessible accommodation at a central NYC location.
• Transport costs.
• Budget for daily sustenance.

I return accessible.travel will supply:

• Company logo with hyperlink to their web site on all New York destination pages.
• Company profile and hyperlink to their web site in the partners page.
• Company logo with hyperlink to their web site in the New York Group of the accessible.travel Community.
• Coverage of the partnership on the accessible.travel Blog.
• Supply of New York data on the company web site if desired with links to the accessible.travel Booking Engine, with payable commissions (subject to agreement of terms and conditions).

The total budget required for the sponsorship deal is $3,000 for all the above benefits.

accessible.travel are especially interested in researching New York at the moment but would also be interested in hearing from any companies that would like to sponsor a different city destination (US or elsewhere). The same offer would apply, for more information please contact me: craig@accessible.travel

I’m pleased to announce that accessible.travel has a new partner, Uptake, that provide information, reviews and a blog about holidays for families. As with travel for people with disabilities there is a lack of information for families with children that would like to travel and this is where UpTake come in.

Although UpTake are not specifically aimed at people with disabilities or mature travellers they have in the past supported our cause through posting blog articles. Now, UpTake are collaborating with to us to redefine the way that we travel  through sponsoring the accessible.travel Community and providing information regarding facilities for people with disabilities with links back to our accommodation pages here at accessible.travel. It’s great to be associated with UpTake and the work that we do together should help both companies.