Event summary

Abstract

Accessible tourism aims to provide seamless experiences across the tourism sector to a full range of consumers, including people with disabilities, ageing populations, and cross-generational families, through the reduction and/or mitigation of attitudinal, informational, and physical barriers. Assistance dogs undergo extensive training to carry out a range of tasks that support people with disabilities to achieve greater independence. However, tourists with assistance dogs remain among the least researched and least catered for segments of the accessible tourism market. This presentation shares the findings of a study conducted in partnership with Assistance Dogs UK and Guide Dogs for the Blind on the travel behaviour of people with disabilities who have an assistance dog, the barriers and constraints to tourism participation, and implications for assistance dog welfare. It puts forward the concept of more-than-human accessibility in an effort to attend to (1) the unique anti discrimination rights of people with disabilities that include assistance dogs as part of reasonable accommodation; (2) the human-assistance dog bond that functions as an affective relationality of cross-species interdependence; (3) the extension of interpersonal constraints on the travel behaviour of people with disabilities to include non-human relations; and (4) the welfare needs of assistance dogs whose work requires them to accompany their human partner on holiday.