Tourist Boards and Accessible Travel

During the 2021 Travel Ability Summit, held in Tampa, a seminar titled “I Want to Become Accessible but Where Do I Start?” highlighted what some destination management companies (DMOs) are doing to ensure their attractions and services are available to all.

Makiko Matsuda Healy, managing director of tourism market development for NYC & Company, the official DMO and CVB for the five boroughs of NYC, discussed how New York is addressing this tourism priority, which is especially vital since out of the city’s 66 million pre-COVID annual visitors, nine million are estimated to have disabilities, according to the NYC Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities.

“We have always had accessibility information on our website, but we really started making changes starting in 2015,” Healy said. “The first of our two [main} goals to make NYC more accessible was to make sure accessibility information was easy to find, accurate and up to date for travel planners, families, caregivers. The second is to educate our travel-related product and service providers about the needs of visitors with disabilities and how to promote them.”

To that end, Healy says NYC & Company has reworked its website to be more user-friendly for researching accessibility and has enabled member businesses to update their own accessibility information. “It is extremely…