28-07-2025
Disabled holidaymakers ‘stay in UK to avoid hotels and airports'
Almost two thirds of families with a disabled member are not travelling abroad this summer over fears that hotels, airlines and airports will fail to cater to their needs, new research has found.
A survey of more than 1,000 people who were either disabled themselves or had someone with a disability in their family, found that 64 per cent said they may not travel abroad this summer.
The survey was carried out earlier this month by the polling company Savanta.
• 'Rights for disabled travellers don't exist in the air'
One of the major issues that emerged from the research was the struggle disabled people face when attempting to book hotels.
Of those surveyed, 58 per cent said the main reason for not going on a foreign holiday was because rooms with accessible facilities were too expensive.
More than half of respondents — 52 per cent — said that even finding a hotel with adequate accessibility provisions in the first place was a challenge. A further 54 per cent said they did not believe that hotels were properly equipped for disabled people.
Furthermore, 47 per cent said they had avoided staying in a hotel over the past 12 months because of accessibility concerns.
Booking flights was another issue, with 40 per cent of those surveyed saying that they had avoided flying over the past year because of accessibility worries and 56 per cent reporting that airlines were not well equipped to support disabled passengers.
A further 58 per cent agreed that international airports were not equipped to meet disabled travellers' needs.
Another problem that emerged from the data was the long delays which families with disabled members faced at airports. Some 51 per cent of the respondents cited this as their main concern when travelling abroad.
Transreport, a technology company focused on improving access for disabled people within the travel and hospitality industries, commissioned the survey. A white paper on aviation published by the company in April found that 48 per cent of disabled passengers had to wait for over 30 minutes when disembarking from an aircraft, and 17 per cent said they waited for over an hour.
In December, a Scottish family from Edinburgh said they had been told how they were left stranded in the Austrian capital Vienna, when a Ryanair flight left without them. Katie Brown, 25, who has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair, told the BBC that she and her family were escorted by the airport's assistance staff to the boarding gate.
But she said that the airline staff failed to show up and they were told that their flight had been cancelled. They later learned the flight had taken off without them.
Ryanair said that airport staff were responsible for special assistance and that Brown and her family had been brought to the gate too late.
Jay Shen, the chief executive of Transreport, said the survey results underlined the 'real-world challenges' disabled people face when they travel.
He said: 'Action across the board is needed to drive lasting, meaningful change and ensure that everyone is able to travel safely and confidently no matter their destination.'
Fazilet Hadi, the head of policy at Disability Rights UK, commented: 'Unfortunately, it's therefore not surprising that for the majority of disabled people, going on holiday poses a wide range of accessibility challenges.
'UK travel companies need to increase options for accessible holiday accommodation. Airlines operating from the UK need to improve their own passenger assistance services and influence better practice in the airports they fly to.'
Emma Vogelmann, from the charity Transport for All, said: 'Most of us look forward to the fun of summer holidays, but as disabled people we find they're blighted by inaccessibility.
'We face booking systems we can't use, missing information about whether we can access things, and the risk of airlines breaking or losing vital equipment or leaving us stranded. The weight of extra cost, barriers, and worries can ruin our enjoyment or stop us travelling at all.
'Thirty years on from the original Equality Act, it's time that the travel industry stepped up to their accessibility responsibilities, so that all of us can enjoy a holiday this year.'
